Knights of Broken Swords
by Farmerbob1
Summary: A magically weak yet highly talented ritualist is put in a position where he absorbs a terrifying curse of hunger. The ritualist's actions are more potent then the Outsiders who arranged the curse expected, however, and two knights of broken swords are drawn into action. Can the two knights successfully oppose the plans of the Outsiders?
1. Chapter 1

_** Most Recent Update 12/31 1100 EST. 5th draft. Cleaned up some overly long sentences, fixed a couple typos and poor word choices that I missed on prior passes. No new content, just cleaning things up._

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><p>Chapter 1: Rebirth of a Tortured Hunter<p>

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><p><em>Cold. <em>_So Cold._ Jenny thought as she carefully put the invoice back on the clipboard. Despite the gloves, she rubbed her hands together and held them in front of one of the air vents blowing warm air. _Not enough heat._ "Carl, I can't believe they paid so much to deliver a battery the size of my smartphone. Two hundred miles round trip, and they paid a thousand dollars?" Jenny shook her head.

Carl smiled. "You aren't thinking about it from their perspective, Jenny. Service companies can only fail to provide timely service a certain number of times per year on a typical contract. If they fail more than 'x' number of times, they might pay penalties, lose bonus money, or possibly lose the contract when the next round of negotiations comes up. We might have cost them a thousand dollars, but if that part hadn't gotten there on time, the real cost to them in the long run might have been a lot more than a thousand dollars."

"I suppose that makes sense." Jenny leaned forward a bit and put her face closer to the heater, reaching over for the twentieth time to make sure the fan was turned all the way up and the heat at the highest temperature setting. "I'm sorry I got upset with you for taking the call and cancelling the dinner and movie date. I was really looking forward to tonight, but I can understand now why you took the call. It would be bad to be unreliable when something like this comes up, I imagine."

Nodding a little, Carl replied. "They understand if I can't take a package every now and then, but I can't turn down an important package without a really good reason. I've never turned down a critical delivery request. In fact, I've turned around mid-delivery from another job to make a critical delivery for this company. Half a dozen packages like this every year adds ten percent to the company gross, and about fifteen percent to the net." He paused. "Can we make up for the busted plans tomorrow night? Dinner and a movie, your choice for both." He checked the mirrors as he nodded. _Why am I nervous?_ There was no clear reason for him to feel nervous, but for some reason, he was. It wasn't because of Jenny, he was sure.

_It's just a bad night to be on the road, I guess._ The weather and traffic station had been playing reports every ten minutes for the whole trip. Carl had kept it on that station the entire time because of the incoming storm. It was coming in from the west, behind them, but it shouldn't be a danger, since the route home was a mostly-straight four-lane road with speed limits over forty-five miles per hour almost the whole way. According to weather reports, the storm was only moving at fifteen miles per hour. If they had been delayed an hour, they would have been traveling in the leading edge of the huge storm as they left their delivery site. They hadn't been delayed though, so the nervousness seemed out of place. He didn't really feel threatened by the encroaching storm. Wary, but not threatened. He decided he would do a tarot reading later that night if the feeling didn't pass. There was nothing he could do while driving.

"Any movie?" Jenny sat up a little straighter, and turned her head towards him with a grin.

"Any movie." _What have I set myself up for?_ He tried to remember if there was anything playing that he knew he would hate. He didn't think so. "However I reserve the right to tickle you mercilessly after the movie if you choose a chick flick." He held his right hand out towards her and wriggled his fingers, but quickly returned his hand to the steering wheel. _Too dangerous to play games in icy conditions, even if the roads seem OK. __Hands at ten and two._ "Anyway, I'm glad you came with me, Jenny, it's always nice to have someone to talk to on the longer runs. I'm sorry the heater doesn't work better. I should have warned you to bundle up a bit more."

"That's OK, Carl, I was planning on staying the night at your place tonight anyway. I imagine I'll find a way to warm up." Jenny winked at him, and then stuck her head back down next to the heater.

Their relationship had really been doing well for the last year, and it had nothing to do with the ritual magic that had brought them together. He'd even worked through the Paranet to ask Warden Dresden, just to be sure an attraction ritual to try to find a good match for him wouldn't be considered coercion. Dresden had said that no, if there was no specific individual targeted, an attraction ritual was just an exaggeration of himself. He even seemed intrigued by the potential of using ritual to lend a magical weight of perceived truth to online dating service ads.

At the same time, because of his responsibilities as a Warden, Dresden had insisted to see the ritual performed, not just the plans for the ritual. Mind control magic of any sort was extremely dangerous to use, and Dresden explained that he wanted to be able to say he knew with no room for doubt that there was no mind control magic involved in this ritual, if anyone were to ask him about it later. It was well known throughout the magical community that mind magic was very dangerous to utilize. It was very possible to do something that might get a death sentence put upon you by the council, and not even realize it if you weren't very careful. Dresden had explained how an apprentice of his had nearly been sentenced to death as a result of her efforts to help her friends using mental coercion_. __Doesn't hurt me to listen to cautionary tales every now and then. __At least he seemed to care._

Carl also knew that Dresden had added a little power of his own to the ritual. Carl could barely light a match with his own innate magical potential, but the detail of his ritual work was, in Warden Dresden's own words, 'extremely impressive.' _I never believed that wizards with significant powers of evocation had such difficulties with electronics. __I thought it was just a story. __He made me a believer when he sneezed in the kitchen and the coffee maker and microwave died. _Carl pulled his thoughts back to the road and did a mirror scan. After verifying that there were no road dangers, he allowed himself to think beck to the ritual again. He knew exactly what that ritual should have felt like with his own power energizing it, and it had been greater than that. Even though Dresden had given no sign that he had helped add a little bit of power to the ritual, there was no doubt he had. A tarot reading later that night had proved it. _I'm surprised he didn't overpower it. __Rumor has it that he has the power of a bulldozer and the subtlety of a marching band of bagpipes. __Obviously not all the rumors about him are true, or he's learning subtlety faster than new rumors can catch up to him._

A week later, Jenny had responded to one of his very honest ads in an online dating service. As he read her initial contact that was filtered through the dating service, he had felt the magic stir in the bracelet that had been the secondary focus of the ritual. As soon as he felt the magic react, he quickly examined her own ad, and was happy with what he saw. He didn't rush headlong into a quick response. He wanted to be sure that he would be a good match for her, not just a one-way match where she would be attracted to him. He had done three tarot readings over three days to determine if they were a good potential match, and the answers had come up solidly in the 'yes' category each time.

"Earth to Carl, you there?" Jenny was apparently waiting for a response of some sort.

"Sorry, Jenny, I spaced out there for a bit. I was just thinking about how lucky I am." He paused. "Despite your ice cold feet. Where did all that Florida girl heat go?"

Jenny smirked. "Apparently it is possible to take the Florida out of a girl, and replace it with Toronto. I have to admit that I'm a bit scared what this winter might bring."

_I just wish she had any sort of magical potential_. He thought. _Some of the careful questions I asked made it clear that she believes in magic. __Her grandmother's ring has some strong magical resonances; it was certainly a ritual object at some point in the last few decades. __I'm sure it is still carrying a small amount of stored power despite clearly not having been touched by magic for a long time._ "Winter is no joke up here. This is the first big storm of the season. It's going to either amaze you, or scare the hell out of you." _I hope you like it here, but if you don't, I'll pull up roots and move. _"My mother said she would love to take you out shopping again if you want to go out for another trip to look for more cold weather clothes. I think that would be a good idea. What you've gotten so far is a solid start, but you want multiples of important things. Hats, gloves, scarves, boots, thermal underwear, over boots, over pants, and even an extra heavy coat. They will get wet, and you do not want to put them back on wet before going out in the cold. That can be deadly."

Carl turned slightly to catch Jenny's eye. "Jenny, I'm sorry if I seem to be pestering you about this, but I'm being deadly serious here, not making fun of you as a Florida girl. Hypothermia can hit you in minutes or even seconds in bad weather if you aren't ready for it. After Hypothermia hits, your body and brain don't work right any more. Think of it like heatstroke in reverse."

"I don't think I have hypothermia right now, Carl, you don't have to use such a big hammer to pound safety knowledge into me." She was a bit irritated but that vanished as she reminded herself again that he was just worried. _The first ten times were enough, but he's sweet, and he obviously cares.__He doesn't harp on me about anything else, and I suspect if I make it through the winter without having some sort of major cold-related malfunction, I won't hear about cold weather dangers again. Much. _ "Sorry, that was a bit rough-edged. I agree that I need more things, Carl, but I needed another paycheck first. Your mother and I have already made plans for Thursday."

Keeping his eyes on the road, Carl tilted his head down and to the right in her direction in a nod of acknowledgement. "Sorry to be annoying about it. I'm just worried. If you have a bad winter, it can be scary. Pretty much everyone up here knows at least a few people who moved to another country after a bad winter, just to get away from the cold here, especially transplants who came here from warmer places."

The back of his neck itched, and Carl scratched it absently. _What in the hell is going on? _He listened to another weather report and looked at the sky. There were no clouds. It was getting colder very quickly. He was pretty sure that it wouldn't get too cold to snow before the cloud cover arrived and started helping to hold in heat.

"More tea?" Jenny asked while thinking to herself. _More tea for me even if you don't want any._

"Yes, please." He chuckled. "I still remember your reaction to hot tea when you came up to visit the first time." _To be fair, iced tea the way she makes it is pretty good too. __I really enjoyed it on the three days this year when it was hot enough to sweat._

"Very funny. Right now I don't really care much what it tastes like. It's hot, or at least warm." _Chamomile tea is very nice though, for reasons I never expected._ Jenny reached over for the tea. As she lifted the thermos, the van hit a little bump in the road, and she dropped it. _Shit._ It rolled under her seat. "My hands are cold, Carl, sorry."

Quickly scanning the mirrors and the road ahead, Carl spoke up. "No worries. The road is straight and, nobody's ahead or behind. Go ahead, unbuckle and grab it, but please buckle back up quick, I don't want a ticket. That would cost me a lot with the miles I drive."

"One quick de-belt and re-belt coming up!" Jenny raised the inside arm on her captain's chair and hit the latch on her seat belt, releasing it. She quickly, carefully moved between the two seats, feeling under her seat, muttering under her breath. "Where is it?"

It was hard to keep his eyes on the road as Jenny searched further and further under her seat, feeling for the thermos. Even with thermal underwear under loose jeans, which were, in turn, under loose sweat pants, her position on hands and knees was suggestive enough to get the blood flowing to his second seat of male thought. _Down boy, that's for later, if we're good._ He managed to drag his eyes back to the road.

There were a couple clunks of metal on metal as Jenny's groping hands knocked the thermos against the metal post supporting the passenger side chair. "Got it!" Jenny called out in a slightly muffled voice. As she backed up, pulling her arms and the thermos from under the seat, she looked over her shoulder at him, and wriggled her bottom at him suggestively.

Carl found himself staring, but ripped his gaze away, and back to the road. There was a curve coming up. "Keep doing that, and I'll pull this car over right now and give you a spanking, young lady!" _Enough games. __I know this curve, I've seen officers waiting here._ "Need you in the seat before the curve, Jenny."

"Promises, promises." Jenny set the thermos on the dash, jamming it in place. "OK, Carl, just trying to warm things up a bit before I sit back down." She smiled to herself. _I can tell by your voice and your eyes that it worked._

As she sat in her seat and reached for her seat belt, Jenny heard Carl exclaim "Fuck!" loudly and felt the van sway slightly and begin to slow as he started to adjust the wheel and carefully hit the brakes. _What?_ She looked up and saw around a dozen elk standing in a line crossing the road, staring at the oncoming headlights of the van. The elk were crossing the road, barely around the curve to where Carl couldn't see them as he was approaching. Even though he had slowed a lot for the corner, the road was slick, black, and very shiny. Before the curve, the ice and snow had been patchy, the road sanded and salted by trucks in preparation for the storm. Where the elk were crossing, the road appeared to be black and shiny, almost like obsidian. There would be almost no traction on the black ice. _Oh, no._ She froze, staring straight ahead, seeing that they were certainly going to hit some of the elk.

As he was trying to figure out what seemed like the best path that would carry them through the line of elk and keep them on the road, Carl snapped out in a loud voice "Seat belt, NOW, Jenny." _I hate elk. If I keep straight, I'll hit at least five of them. __It looks like only one of them is in the farthest oncoming lane, I'll hit that one if it doesn't move, and try to bounce the van off of it towards the center of the road._

He was an expert driver, literally. He even had the certificate. To get it, he had taken combat driving classes four years ago, not because of any real need for it, but because he drove for a living and wanted any advantage he could get. Some of his deliveries took him into unfriendly, high crime areas, but physics could be more dangerous than carjackers. _Curve. __Black ice. Elk. __Jenny's still not in her seat belt. __She's mentally locked up. _After a brief moment of not-so-rational thought, Carl acted._ I can't steer sharply right now anyway._ Carl gripped the wheel tightly with his left hand and loosened his right hand from the wheel. He then carefully slapped his right hand over her face, to block her vision, clearly startling her. He called out, "Seat belt, Jenny, NOW!" loudly before slapping his hand back to the wheel and slowly, carefully adjusted his trajectory as he nursed the brakes, barely touching them. He looked at the speedometer. _Forty miles per hour. __This will hurt._

Jenny had bounced back in her seat, pushed back more by her reaction to him covering her eyes than by any physical pressure from his hand. She looked at him with wild eyes and then looked down, rapidly started trying to get her seat belt on. As her hand crossed her waist with the seat belt, inches from completing the connection, the van hit the first elk.

The elk were not cooperating as Carl guided the van towards them. They had started moving around, slowly at first on the ice, and then trying to run after he got within about twenty yards. Elk had no special skill for walking on black ice, and the ones that tried to run fell over on their sides, or lost their balance and went sprawling with long legs pointing in random directions. Instead of a line of elk standing still, staring at the van, there was now a line of chaotically sliding and spinning elk in various poses. Carl was locked into survival mode, all of his concentration on the van, the road, and the elk. He lost track of Jenny. There was nothing else he could do for her other than make the wreck as survivable as possible.

The clasp of the seat belt jerked out of Jenny's grasp as the van's front right wheel thumped over the torso of the first elk. _No! _She bounced up and out of her chair, smacking her head on the roof of the van, hard. Jenny fell into a pile, her lower body on the floorboard in front of her seat, her upper body laying limp on the seat itself.

After the van ran over the first elk, it immediately hit two more elk that were not laying down, glancing off them in quick succession and throwing the van into a slow spin on the ice. For more than two seconds, Carl had zero control over the van. After those two seconds, the van left the road, passing through a gap in the protective barrier that had apparently been damaged by another recent wreck and not yet repaired. The van somehow left the road with the nose facing into the gap in the protective barrier, and Carl risked a single hard pull at the steering wheel to straighten the tires, hoping to find some traction, hoping there was a soft shoulder to let him stop the spin before they went over the ledge he could see approaching.

The van responded, the spin slowing down as it hit a spot of snow and frozen grass. There was a heavy impact as the van hit something in the grass he couldn't see, and completely stopped rotating, though it's forward motion was not slowed by much. Somehow a thought managed to make its way into his mind. _Probably one of the broken barrier supports, tall enough to hit a tire, too short to see in the snow and grass._

Then the van hit the ledge beyond the barrier. Carl's mind froze as the van went into full airborne flight. The van's right side front tire had collapsed at some point after hitting the first elk, and as the van went airborne. The uneven level of the front end, combined with the uneven ledge started the van spinning again. This time it was a slow spin, clockwise along the long axis; the right side of the van was rotating down, and the left side was rotating up.

Carl could only stare in stupefied horror as his van fell, spinning slowly in the air like an American football, towards a short, frozen waterfall in a stream around twenty feet below the level of the road. He had lost all sense of up or down, but he didn't need to know up or down to see that large rocks were in front of his windshield as the van fell. The last thing he managed before darkness enveloped him was to desperately pull the keys out of the ignition, cover his face with both hands, pull his legs back away from the pedals and make a short prayer to a god he hadn't believed in for twenty years. _God help us._

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><p><em>Very nearly perfect.<em> If any human had heard that voice in their head, they would have been physically ill. The thoughts were cold, rancid, and dark. It would be clear to any listener that compassion was outside the experience of the mental voice. Sanity itself might be a fleeting memory to a man or woman hearing the thoughts of this being, even after brief exposure.

_The plan still seems overly complex. _The second mental voice was just as replete with foulness as the first. _I wish there had been a more viable method to act more directly on the target._

The first mental voice took a moment to respond, carefully phrasing its thoughts. _The primary target is too well guarded against direct assault. __Even most points of potential weakness at one or two points removed are being carefully monitored by the target or his allies. __You know this. __We agreed on this path. __Do you dissent after the path is chosen?_

Words chosen with extreme care were spoken in return by the second voice. _No, I do not dissent. I merely express displeasure that our target is so well guarded that we much work at such a distance. __Chaos is beautiful in many ways, but when it comes to planning, it is less than welcome._

_I can agree with that sentiment, but it is not a valid concern until we must plan again. __It is now time to act. __Assist me; we must restore the environment rapidly, before witnesses arrive to complicate matters._

Two dark shapes crossed the road rapidly. As they passed the elk on the road, and all signs that the animals had ever existed disappeared. A few pained and terrified animal squeals punctuated the eruptions of darkness from their bodies. A stretch of highway barrier raised itself out of a nearby ditch and fitted itself perfectly into the gap that the van had just passed through. The black ice on the road disappeared, and ice and snow, sand and salt were blown back onto the road from where they had been piled earlier. The dark shapes rapidly, effortlessly, climbed down the steep slope to stand next to the upside-down van.

_The human managed to disengage the engine of his vehicle. _The first voice commented. _Unexpected foresight in the face of disaster. __These humans almost seem intelligent sometimes._

_It may have been an accident._ The other voice was clearly not convinced that humans were of noteworthy intelligence.

_It will wake soon, we must finish preparations. __Remember to double-think each action. __We cannot act upon this one directly, or our involvement will certainly be detected._

Both beings rapidly began melting ice and shifting boulders, refreezing the boulders into place again after their positions were adjusted, carefully blocking any possible exit for a human from the van. The fuel tank of the vehicle was torn open and the fuel disposed of, consumed by the same cold darkness that had consumed the elk.

After verifying that everything was organized correctly, one of the two dark forms pulled a small cloth roll out of the amorphous darkness at its side, unrolling the cloth until a figurine was visible. The figurine was gently placed next to the middle of the van, where the roof met the frozen stream. Every action with the figurine was slow, deliberate, as if the small wooden figure was incredibly delicate.

Care had to be taken. The figurine had been extremely difficult to acquire, and it was hungry.

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><p>Carl hurt everywhere, and was upside down. He knew he wasn't thinking right. He felt cold as hell. <em>What happened?<em>

His eyes didn't want to open, but eventually they did. After a few moments, he was rewarded with a fuzzy, grainy view of reality that seemed off-balance somehow. Everything was moving, slightly changing position all the time. _Concussion? __Eyes aren't tracking right._

_I'm hanging from my seat belt. __I can't feel my legs._ _There must have been a wreck. __That would explain the rocks sticking through the windshield._

He saw a figure laying on the roof of the van below him, curled up a bit, laying on her side, relaxed. "Jenny!" She didn't answer. "I'll let you sleep while I figure out what to do, Jenny."

She seemed to nod back at him.

He tried to move his arms. They both worked, but his right arm hurt like mad. _Probably broken. __Need to get help. __There was something else I needed to do first though. __Oh, my head. __Is it broken?_

Carl took a few moments with both hands to feel around his head and neck for holes or things that were just soft or wrong in some way. Moving his arms made it clear that there were broken ribs on his right side. He ignored the bloody bits of glass that rained down onto the floor as he brushed it out of his skin and scalp. Everything seemed OK. _Except my brain, an arm, a couple ribs, and my legs._

He looked up at the roof of the van then realized, again, that he was upside down, and the roof was down. _How long have I been out? __Am I hypothermic too?_

_My hands would be pale and tingly if I was hypothermic. __They don't feel tingly._ Carl looked at each of his hands carefully for a few seconds. Still a healthy color.

_Still too cold. __I don't have forever. __Have to act._

His left hand reached towards the base of the seat belt, where it was bolted to the floor. He twisted his left arm, wrapping the tight seat belt twice around his arm for more support before he gripped the belt hard with his left hand, and flexed his arm, taking up all the tension he could, trying to make the left arm like a bar of steel. When he was ready, he pressed the seat belt release with his right hand. There was a brief falling and twisting sensation accompanied by a spike of pain to the right forearm and right ribs. Then there was darkness again.

When he woke, he was hanging from his right arm. His left shoulder hurt like hell, but he still had sensation in his left hand, which was still wrapped in the seat belt. _It couldn't have been long. __I'm still hanging by the arm. __I can feel my legs now, at least. Pins and needles. __They must have just had the circulation cut off._

Jenny was still in a fetal position, sleeping, so he left her alone.

He began looking for a phone, either his or hers, and found both of them to be broken, completely powerless.

_I'm going to have to do magic. __If Jenny figures it out, so be it._ He thought about it for a moment, and then looked at Jenny's grandmother's ring. _It will take me a while, but I can recharge the ring. Not that it matters to Jenny, but having a small source of magical power can make a huge difference, especially right now._

Out loud, he apologized. "I need your grandmother's power, Jenny, it might save us both." Jenny didn't object, so he took her grandmother's ring. When he touched it, the silver ring was cold. "Florida girl, you need to work on that heat."

_Need a place to draw the ritual diagram. _Despite the unsteady world and occasional doubling of everything, he managed to clear off a mostly flat area of roof in the back of the van.

A strange thought struck him. _I should check if there are any houses or buildings nearby. __Why didn't I already think of that? Concussion. Duh._

Carl dragged himself over to each door in turn, and looked out the broken windows. It was very dark. _Why can I see in the van?_ He looked back to see where the light was coming from. The overhead light, in the roof of the van, at his feet was lit. _How long will that last?_ He looked out into the extremely heavy snowfall. _The storm. __There was a storm coming, I think?_ He could see no buildings. No smoke. He heard one car pass by. It sounded far away.

_Cars. __Help._ He tried to open the back and side doors, but couldn't. Feeling out the windows with his good left arm, trying not to stress his right ribs, he found rocks, huge rocks, pressed against the doors. None of them could open more than a couple inches. The rocks were also blocking the windows enough that an adult would never be able to make it past them. The front doors on either side were similarly blocked. The windshield was pressed up against a bunch of rocks too. Every window was sufficiently blocked by large rocks that he couldn't crawl past. _Trapped. No choice. __Need a summoning ritual. __Summon help. __Power it with the ring._

He was starting to shiver. _Hypothermia? Have to hurry. Need a writing tool and ink. There was__ red ink by Jenny._

The red ink was pretty thick, but it would work. It took him a minute to think of where he could get a good writing tool that was precise enough for a ritual diagram. _Jenny's purse has a makeup kit in it_. He found her purse and retrieved one of the little brushes.

Carl laid down on his stomach next to his working space and carefully placed the ring, before starting to build the diagram from the inside out. Every few minutes he would go back and collect more of the congealed ink. In about thirty minutes there was a simple diagram.

_The ring powers the signal._

He read the runes that defined the signal again. Nothing complex. _Help._

Probably the simplest ritual he had ever designed, and the fastest. He had taken some shortcuts with how certain parts of the symbols were written, but he could see the way the power would flow. _Something is missing._ _Limits and protections? Rules? __The ring doesn't have much power. __I don't have time to do it all over. __The ink in the diagram is frozen anyhow, and the spilled ink by Jenny is nearly solid too._

_This doesn't feel right, but I don't think I could survive long enough to do it twice._ After a brief moment of hesitation, Carl placed his finger on the activation point and powered it with all the energy he could - barely enough to activate the power siphon on the ring. He could feel the ring's power as it activated the signal.

Carl crawled back to Jenny and lay next to her, unzipping his jacket and draping it over her. "Help will be here soon, Jenny. They will bring blankets and hot tea. Here, I'll make your hands warm with mine." Carl took Jenny's cold hands in his own, and kissed her forehead.

Almost immediately, the small wooden figurine began to move, slowly standing to its full height of six inches. It cautiously walked into the van through the broken side window. After entering the vehicle, it scanned the interior quickly, and then walked over to the ritual diagram. The figurine walked around the diagram three times, looking at it closely, and then walked over to Carl, who was shivering uncontrollably, eyes closed.

With a cruel smile, the figurine said "Help" and touched Carl's forehead with his hand. The figurine disappeared and Carl's eyelids popped open.

_So Hungry._


	2. Chapter 2

**5th Draft. 12/31 1400 EST Various bits cleaned up. Found a couple more overly-long sentences and rewrote those bits to make shorter sentences.

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><p>Chapter 2: Monster Hunting Time.<p>

_Blake and Evan are drawn, somehow, out of Chapter Sine Die 14.2 of the Pact universe._

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><p>The last tick of the cosmic clock rang powerfully in my ears. Not loudly, but magically powerful in a way that it is hard to describe. All of a sudden, I found myself at least ten feet in the air, and falling. My first thought wasn't fear, fear was an emotion I had mostly lost as I shed my humanity. I barely even knew I was falling. The first thought was that everyone I cared about had disappeared. <em>Betrayed.<em> I could feel the anger building. _I'm going to kill you, Alister._

I managed to hit the ground and roll without breaking anything. A confused voice called out from inside my chest cavity. "Uh, Blake, where's the house?"

If I could breathe, I would have breathed a sigh of relief. _Evan is here._ Then I could feel my emotions hardening into anger again. _Green Eyes isn't._

laying on my back on the ground with snow falling heavily onto and around me, I stared into the moonless, near-perfect darkness. The wind varied from a light breeze to momentary blasts of power that shrieked through overhead branches blowing cascades of icicles out of the trees. Motionless, I tried to figure out what had just happened. I carefully used all of my senses to see if there was anything dangerous nearby. Evan popped out from the gaps between a couple of the many branches that defined my chest. He hopped around rapidly, looking in every direction and fluttered his wings. He clearly wanting to fly, but his recent injury prevented it. "Where are we? We were in the house. Alister started that ritual, everything slowed down, and bam. Here? I don't get it. Is this the Abyss? It looks like a forest. Where are the others? I..."

I reached out my left index finger and tapped his head carefully, avoiding the wound along his back. He ignored the first tap. At my second touch, his head moved with absurd birdlike rapidity to focus one eye on me. By the third tap, he had gone still and silent as he saw that my right index finger was over my lips. He nodded, and hopped back inside my torso. I could feel him rapidly moving around within me, looking out from various vantage points.

My body seemed uninjured. I had landed well, without even thinking about it. Granted, even if I had fallen poorly, a fall of ten feet would not have caused much damage. For a few more seconds, I continued to carefully try to detect watchers, emotions directed at me, anything of interest. All I felt was a single strange, powerful connection. That connection was not a watcher, I was fairly sure. It felt rigidly defined, inorganic, and mechanical. It was also maddeningly attractive. It wasn't really a connection like I was used to thinking of connections. It was more like a fishing line, slowly pulling me in.

That seemed to indicate I wasn't being watched by anything that would act, other than the connection creating the connection to me. Slowly, I stood, not wanting to move rapidly. It was possible to watch someone carefully and avoid creating a noticeable connection - I had done it quite a few times myself. There was no reason that others couldn't do the same against me, if they were very skilled or just naturally sneaky. I didn't feel like making it easy on anyone who might be looking for me. I didn't just appear here for no reason, I was pretty sure, and the compulsion I was feeling was already irritating me.

After standing, I cupped my right hand, and raised it in front of my chest, by one of the larger gaps. Evan hopped out onto my hand, still looking around at everything. I could feel irritation, confusion, and some fear from him. He constantly was looking in the same direction I was feeling the pull from.

I leaned over and rubbed my left hand over the dry, new snow, obscuring some of the marks left by my tumbling fall. Evan looked up at me and nodded before carefully beating his wings. The snow around us, both on the ground and still falling through the air, rapidly shifted and hid the evidence of my fall.

Then I pointed in the direction of the strange connection-like thing that I could detect, touching my lips and shaking my head. _There might be answers there. There better be answers there._

Evan nodded and hopped back into my torso. A second later, he popped back up next to my right ear. I tilted my head towards him so he could speak directly into my ear without climbing up into my long, unkempt hair. "I see that weird connection. It's really hard to resist following it. That worries me. Do you want me to break it? I think I can."

I shook my head. He had a point. Since becoming an Other, I had discovered quite a few things. One of the most important was that, typically, when something was trying to attract you, it wasn't a good thing. On the other hand, this connection was a clue. It mattered. I could feel its importance. It might lead to a way home, or to someone that could help me find a way home.

Holding my hands up against my face, I whispered into them when the storm winds blew, counting on Evan's hearing to be able to discern my words. "Unless you see anything else, it's our only clue. Breaking that connection might not be a good idea. It doesn't feel malevolent. It feels... mechanical, and somehow needy."

His little sparrow body fluffed its feathers a bit before Evan spoke into my ear again. "You're right. It doesn't feel like a trap." He paused, clearly for emphasis. "Good traps don't feel like traps."

I nodded, but started walking slowly, walking on my toes and lifting my feet entirely clear of the snow with each step so I wouldn't leave tracks that looked even vaguely human. It wouldn't fool anyone who really knew how to track, and was paying attention, but if anyone came along that wasn't both capable and attentive, they might easily miss my tracks, or think they belonged to some other animal.

In my ear again, this time hanging from my hair, Evan asked "Is this the Abyss again? It doesn't feel like the Tenements did."

_This is definitely not the abyss._ I shook my head to answer Evan, and felt him relax significantly. If I hadn't been ripped away from everything I knew, the land around us might even be relaxing. A paper cup fluttered by, clearly indicating that there were humans nearby. _Or there were humans nearby, or someone wants us to think there are or were humans nearby._

I shook my head, slowly. _First things first._ I looked at the cup again, without looking directly at it. No sign of enchantment that I could detect. It didn't appear to be any sort of trigger.

After a few minutes, we had covered about a mile. Evan spoke into my ear. "I heard a car! I know I did. There's a road nearby." He hopped around on my shoulder a bit, agitated, before he jumped back onto my hair again and spoke into my ear. "Also, I recognize this landscape Blake."

_Important!_ Stopping immediately, I slowly raised my hands again, speaking into them as the wind blew, like before. "Explain. I don't recognize anything."

"The hills, the rock outcrops, and that stream over there. It's the same as the land around the Hillsglade house. It threw me off, to begin with, because the place where we landed didn't have the same contours as the land around the Hillsglade house, but I think that's because, wherever we are, there's never been a Hillsglade house there." He paused. "It's a little different looking from this level than from the air, but it's the same land. I'm sure of it."

I nodded. Doubting Evan's considered observations about terrain and environment was a losing proposition. He'd never been wrong about the environment around us when he spoke confidently. A clue. _Did Alister send me back in time, somehow?_

Another paper cup blew by in the wind. Evan had heard cars. The Hillsglade house had been around for far longer than cars and paper cups. Briefly, I considered the absurdity of defining my personal reality by the presence of litter, and then I shook my head and carefully examined the nearby environment again. Nothing noteworthy other than that single, needy beacon, the siren call drawing us in.

I started walking forward again, slowly, still on my toes. Every now and then, Evan looked behind us and shook his wings. When I glanced behind me, I could see that he wasn't completely erasing the footprints, he was just making them look older, more filled in. _Conserving his energy._

Reaching over my right shoulder with my left hand, I tapped Evan on the head, pointed behind us with my other hand, and shook my head slowly. Evan looked at me, twisting his head until his eyes were nearly above one another, clearly confused. I made a flat shape out of my extended fingers and thumb of my right hand, and raised it to my forehead, turning my head back and forth, mimicking a lookout. Then I pointed at him.

Evan hopped back onto my hair again, and talked into my ear, quietly. "I'm doing that TOO, Blake. I'm a bird, I'm wired that way. I'm always watching." After a pause, he muttered, "It's kind of annoying sometimes. I can't turn it off. Ty would wave his hand behind me every now and then while we were playing video games against each other. It almost always startled me. He still lost most of the time though." He grabbed a bit of my hair with his beak or a claw, and tugged, briefly, moving it out of his way, before jumping back to my shoulder and continuing to disguise our tracks.

_Green Eyes, Ty, Tiff, Alexis. Thanks for reminding me, Evan._ I closed my eyes for a second until the pain faded a bit. Shrugging, I moved forward again. We were close. I could walk slightly left or right of the most direct path to the strange connection, and feel its position shift slightly in relationship to me. I could tell roughly where it was, and saw a streambed. I angled myself towards a higher spot of land, while still walking towards the source of the connection.

_Like a moth. I feel like a moth._

I reached into my torso and pulled out the Hyena. The broken sword's hilt spikes fitted into the gnarled woodwork and bone of my right hand perfectly. _If there's a spider over there, it's in for a surprise._

A sparrow wing slapped against the side of my face, once, startling me. I immediately stopped moving and Evan spoke into my ear again. "Pick me up. I see something."

When I held up my left hand to my right shoulder, Evan hopped on, and held out a wing, pointing at something I couldn't see. I brought him directly in front of my face, and the position of his wing shifted slightly. He was turned sideways on my palm, and seemed to be looking up at my eyes with his left eye, while looking along his wing with his right eye. _That's just creepy, Evan._

Adjusting my head and left hand slightly, I carefully lined up my vision with Evan's wing, almost like looking down the barrel of a rifle. As I carefully looked at what was visible at the tip of Evan's wing, the first thing I saw was a tire, several feet in the air above the creek bed. Then I saw the mostly obscured grill and headlights, covered by snow. It took a second to realize it was an upside-down white van, with a heavy buildup of snow. Evan seemed impatient for some reason.

Nodding fractionally, I slowly moved my hand back to my shoulder and let Evan jump back onto me. He hopped back and forth across the entire length of my shoulders, and then hopped back up next to my right ear. "The van's the source, for sure, but there's something else in there. I heard it."

Evan said there was a road nearby, but he hadn't said how close. I didn't want drivers seeing me in this weather, I might cause an accident. "Where did the van come from?" I asked, once again cupping my hands in front of my face, and waiting for the wind.

He pointed with a wing, towards the van. "The road is beyond the van, nearby. I heard another car a couple minutes ago, but with all the snow in the air, it's hard to get a real good idea of how far away the road is. It can't be far though, not with the van here like it is."

I nodded, and then froze, carefully averting my eyes away from the van as I felt a ravenous hunger emanating from that direction. Apparently, we had drawn the attention of whatever Evan had heard. I was confident, from the feel, that it still hadn't found us, but it had been made suspicious. Evan frantically jumped off my right shoulder, falling between me and the van with his wings spread wide, flapping madly as he fell to the ground. I went completely still. Evan hit the snow hard. He wasn't even trying to flap for the last two feet he fell, he was holding his wings at full extension, trembling.

Peripherally, I saw some movement through the broken windshield of the upside-down van. I gripped the spiked handle of the Hyena, remembering. _Evan knows more about bad things in the woods than I ever want to._

Based on how close to panic Evan seemed to be when blocking that first connection, I very slowly moved my head and averted my eyes until I could no longer see the van at all. Evan would warn me if we needed to run. Since he was still too injured to fly, I prepared to grab him with my left hand. Without moving at all, I carefully scanned the environment for the best escape path in my field of view that also put obstacles between the van and the escape route.

The ravenous sensation from the van abruptly stopped. Evan partially collapsed into the snow, but stayed upright.

The connection, the needy connection, the siren's call, it was still there. Was the thing in the van some sort of Other that hunted with a lure, like a deep-sea anglerfish? I'd never heard of any such thing, but I wasn't exactly an expert on Others, despite being one.

After a few seconds, I heard the van's weight shift, the sound of metal on ice and stone. Then it shifted again, and several more times after that. _Something heavy is walking around in the van._

I carefully, slowly, looked down at Evan. He was trembling, crouched down, all of his feathers fluffed out, making him look like a little puffball with widely outspread wings. He was clearly stressing out. _Whatever is in the van is scaring him badly._

I started to slowly crouch down. Evan abruptly shook his head twice, looking at me with his left eye, and then shook his head again. I froze. Motionless.

There was a terrific clangor of metal on stone, followed by a grunt and a loud snuffle. Then more grunts that were accompanied by the shrill squeals and harsh ripping sounds of stressed, torn metal.

I didn't move a hair. Not a single hair. I saw something move in my peripheral vision from my right eye. Whatever it was stopped moving, and I felt that ravenous hunger again. I slowly closed my right eye. _Whatever it is, it seems hypersensitive to being watched._

After a few more seconds, I heard something snuffle like it was trying to get a scent. There was a third sensation of ravenous hunger. This time, I barely felt the hunger before Evan broke the connection with finality, for the third time. Whatever the beast was, it left rapidly after that. By the sounds of its movement, I suspected it was almost as fast as one of Jeremy's maenads. That would put it in a class with me for speed. I also realized that it had apparently just ripped a hole in the side of a van in less than five seconds, which put it far outside my strength. It was also, apparently, very perceptive, to have almost detected us three times, even if Evan had been able to break the connections.

Evan had fallen flat on his chest, beak spearing the surface of the snow, with his wings outspread. I carefully scooped him up with my left hand, held him up a few inches from my face, and spoke very, very softly. "You ok there, Chicken Nugget?"

Evan opened his eyes and fluffed his whole body, shaking off bits of snow I had picked up with him. "Not OK. That thing felt as bad as the Hyena was. Maybe worse." He shook himself again, clearly not just to shake snow off himself. "The way he was trying to make connections was weird too, I had a very hard time stopping him from connecting to us. Next time should be easier, if there is a next time."

"Do you think it's coming back, Evan?"

Evan looked in the direction it had left, and back at the van. "I don't think so. I think it was attracted to the van like we were."

"Why did it have to tear its way out then?"

Evan was silent for a second. "Good point. Maybe it was smaller before it ate? I know I heard it eating before it heard us the first time."

_I'm afraid I know what it was eating. Not that I can really say much about using humans as a source of sustenance. I certainly don't know the whole story._

The strange connection, the almost irresistible siren's call, was still insistently calling to me from the vehicle.

Evan and I carefully circled the van, and I had been right, whatever it was had ripped the doors off the van. Despite the fact that I had guessed correctly, I was startled because the doors had been ripped off by pulling them _into_ the van, not pushing them out. I mentally raised my estimate of the thing's strength. It could well be physically stronger than anything else I'd ever fought. Still, it was clearly not terribly intelligent if it pulled the doors inward instead of pushing them out. Even with the rocks in the way, the doors could have been bent off their hinges much easier the other way.

"That's the source of the attractive connection, Blake." Evan pointed a wing down at the roughly six-inch diameter diagram drawn in dark red on a section of the sheet metal of the van's roof.

I had already been looking at it. It was clearly the source, but I nodded for Evan anyway. "I see. What I don't see is how it does what it's doing. The ring in the middle of the diagram is probably a power source, but the symbols are all wrong, and some of the symbols are touching one another. I've never seen anything like it at all."

Evan crawled out of my torso near my right leg and moved down the leg towards the ground sideways, alternately gripping with his claws as he moved towards the ground. I stayed still so I didn't shake him off by accident. When he reached my knee, he hopped off, and went over to look at the diagram.

After a few seconds, Evan started talking again. "This is really weird. I've never seen a diagram like it, and I saw a bunch of them in the books Ty, Tiff, Alexis, and Rose were reading. I didn't understand anything I saw, but none of it looked like this, and everything they were looking at shared some symbols in common. I've never seen _any_ of these symbols, other than the circle and the triangles drawn inside it." Evan paused, clearly thinking. "Tiff said the circle and triangles were like the pages of the book, the important stuff was what you wrote around them." He hopped around a couple times outside the circle. "I was bored a lot, and stuff I see is easy to remember, so I memorized all the symbols I saw. I have no clue what those symbols meant, but I know that I've never seen any of _these_ symbols. Not even one."

I nodded. I had been a practitioner, albeit briefly, and what Evan was saying was right as far as I knew. The fact that some of the symbols touched one another just seemed very, very wrong. "Apparently there's a different way to do things, Evan."

I managed to avoid saying it aloud and discouraging Evan, but I couldn't help but think it for myself. _"Just what I need. New rules in a new game and a potential enemy much stronger than me that I don't understand. Again."_ Then I looked up to where the van's front seats were. I hadn't looked before, because the diagram had kept me captivated, but some fluttering cloth had caught my eye, and that was enough to draw my attention to the rest.

Evan noticed my attention shift and he turned to stare too before flatly stating "Yeah. A lot like the Hyena. At least he killed her all the way."

The wreckage of the body in front of us was barely recognizable as female. The beast had apparently eaten only the choicest bits, the parts with the most body fat. Internal organs, breasts, brain, marrow from the largest bones. There wasn't much gore splatter though. She had apparently been dead for a while before it had torn her apart.

If I had still been human, I probably would have been ill. As it was, perverse as it might sound, I _wanted_ to be ill, because a good puke might have helped me feel cleaner. Humans just weren't supposed to look like the leftovers from a crude butcher's day at work. _I've cut the bones out of dead enemies to heal myself, but still, nothing like this. This is just... too much._

Evan didn't say anything; he just stared at me.

It didn't matter. I knew what he was thinking, and he knew that I knew. "Are you sure, Evan?"

He didn't answer me, he just hopped into the diagram and pecked at the ring a couple times to break it loose from the frozen blood holding it in place. The diagram, no longer powered by the ring, stopped generating the connection to us. The cessation of the connection was both a relief and a loss of something familiar.

Picking up the ring in his beak, Evan hopped over and set it on the ground in front of my left foot with a metallic click. "I've been where she is, Blake."

I considered my words carefully. "I know I promised we would hunt monsters, and the thing that ate the woman certainly seems to qualify, but we're obviously not in Kansas anymore. We don't know the rules here, wherever here is."

"That's never stopped you before." Evan was looking up at me, expectantly.

_Ur won. _ I carefully did not say. Evan wouldn't remember Ur anyway.

I picked up the ring, and put it on my left pinkie finger. With my right hand still holding the Hyena, I carefully used my right index finger to displace a few twigs that were part of my left pinkie finger. Then I carefully rearranged them to grow around the blood-crusted ring to hold it in place. After the twigs stopped adjusting themselves, I clenched my left hand into a fist to make sure the pinkie finger remained flexible and the ring stayed trapped as the finger flexed. "OK, Evan, its monster hunting time."


	3. Chapter 3

**4th Draft. 12/31 1600 EST

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><p>Chapter 3: Probably Improbable<p>

Shortly after Skin Game, Butters and Bob find themselves being drawn into a strange situation. Again.

* * *

><p><em>She must be six feet tall and two hundred fifty pounds. <em>I wondered to myself. _Maybe even bigger than Gard._ "Do you have anything to declare, Mr..." the inspector looked at my Passport before continuing. "Butters?"

I tried to make a little joke. "Only that I would have rather ended this flight in Chicago, by the flight plan."

The inspector's eyebrows drew together. "Mr. Walter Butters. Do you understand what I am asking when I ask if you have anything to declare?"

_So much for a sense of humor. One or both of us seem to be lacking._ "Yes, I understand. No, I do not have anything to declare. This backpack contains some of my clothes, travel toiletries, and educational materials. I only have this one carry-on bag." I started unzipping all the pockets and main compartments of the backpack.

When I opened Bob's packing box, the woman touched the skull in its carefully constructed nest of t-shirts and socks. Covered in runes and varnish, it didn't look like a real skull. "Why is it that you are entering Canada again, Mr. Butters?"

"I didn't want to come to Canada." I began.

That got me a flat stare from the inspector.

_I really don't want Bob impounded. Start over._ "My flight from the UK was routed here. The weather in Chicago is too bad to land safely. I am a US citizen and plan to buy a bus ticket or rent a vehicle and cross the border in time to get home for my cousin's marriage tomorrow."

The giant woman's expression softened a bit. "A marriage? I hope you make it home OK. The last I heard, busses aren't travelling west out of Toronto right now though, and people are being strongly encouraged to stay off the roads." She patted my backpack, pushed it back towards me, and grinned. "I hope your stay in Canada is as short as possible, Mr. Butters."

I couldn't help but smile. _She did have a sense of humor after all_. _Even if it was just a short joke._

I stopped zipping zippers on the backpack and looked up at her again. It hadn't just been a short joke, it was also a comment on my Canada flub earlier. I gave her another grin. "Well done, inspector, I just got the second half of the joke."

The inspector nodded to me with a little twinkle in her eye.

I finished zipping up my backpack and tossed it over my shoulder before walking away. After a couple steps, from inside the backpack, I heard a voice. "I'm going to tell Andi you've been flirting again."

I just smiled. It was a joke between Bob and Andi. Whenever I got back from a trip, Bob would tell Andi I had been flirting, Andi would change to her partial wolf shape, sniff at me while I was answering questions about my male fickleness, and then change back to her human self and throw me on the bed where I would be suitably chastised for my imagined acts of relational infidelity. Bob was allowed to listen. Not watch. Andi liked Bob and got along with him. She recognized that he really wasn't human, but she'd drawn the line at visual voyeurism. She'd also gotten extremely upset with Bob the first time he'd tried to offer advice verbally from inside the backpack. Since then he had been very studiously quiet as he listened, after 'helping us' set things in motion.

_I'm still amazed Andi didn't crush his skull for that comment._

I walked out of the terminal past a couple more security stations, and showed _Fidelacchius_ to a metal detector attendant who wasn't impressed by a bladeless sword that was not much better in a fight than a penny roll, and then, finally, I was free of the international terminal.

_How does Sanya deal with this all the time?_

_Self-check. Customs is annoying. Not dangerous_.

"You look lost young man, can I help? Where is your guardian?" A tall, dark-skinned help station kiosk attendant with frosty grey hair called out to me from a few feet away. As I turned to face him, he apparently noticed my five o'clock shadow. If a dark-skinned black man could blush so that I could see it, I'm sure I would have seen it then. The tone of his voice changed slightly and he coughed nervously once. "Uh, can I help you, sir?"

_Sometimes I wish mom and dad had heard about human growth hormone therapy when I was a kid._ "Yes, please. Could you point me towards the bus ticket kiosk?"

The attendant looked genuinely sorry. "Waste of time sir, it's closed. The long haul busses aren't running now, only the hotel busses, shuttling passengers to hotels. Was your flight cut short by the weather?"

"Yes. My flight from the UK to Chicago was cut short here. I need to be in Chicago by tomorrow for my cousin's marriage or my mother will string me up by the heels on the first day of the Festival of Lights and let everyone under thirteen beat me with a stick until candy falls out."

The man gave me a strange look. _He might even know that piñatas aren't part of Hanukkah. Well, this is Canada, not America._ I sighed to myself._ Stop that. He thought you were a kid and offered to help. He's got nothing to do with you being short._

I nodded at him, and broke the brief silence I had created. "Thank you for helping me avoid wasting my time. Can you direct me to the car rentals?" _I really would rather not drive in a winter storm, but Mom's reaction probably wouldn't be much shy of what I described, even if it was entirely verbal._

"Yes, Sir." The attendant pulled out a cheap-looking paper map not much thicker than tissue paper, and a black marker. He oriented the map, showed me the "You Are Here" star, and quickly drew four lines, one to each of the car rental stations.

"Thank you very much!" I nodded as I walked off. I couldn't help but look back at the desk. Not even a smudge of black on the brilliant white surface. Looking at the paper, it looked like Tyvek. That was weird. The marker should have bled through. I certainly had spent enough time scrubbing black marker off my arms after I wrote notes on my Tyvek scrubs back when I was a full time coroner instead of a consultant.

"Bob, remind me to have you look closely at this paper. It's really thin and very impermeable, I can think of a few possible uses for it." I tried to tear off a corner. It didn't tear easily, but it wasn't fibrous like Tyvek. "Definitely a couple ideas."

"Noted, Boss." Bob's voice said, from the backpack.

The first two rental agencies were closed and the third was closing, with no vehicles to rent. The fourth was willing to rent me a car, but the agent at the counter was doing everything he could to convince me that it would be better to wait until the morning. The only car they had was a tiny little single-seat hybrid with a leaf blower engine it used to recharge a few laptop batteries that powered three roller-skate wheels.

The agent followed me out to the car to do the inspection. When we were outside the terminal with the wind howling around us, he let loose with both barrels. "Mr. Butters, I couldn't say this inside because it's my job to rent cars, but I can't _not _say it out here. This car is a deathtrap in this weather. It weighs less than twelve hundred pounds and catches air like the sails of a galleon. The only reason it's here at all is that some fool drove it from Atlanta. It was going back down to Atlanta by flatbed tomorrow with some other microminis."

"I understand, but I'm not going to let my mother down. She will never forgive me. I promised."

He paused, looking at me to be sure I was listening. "I have some passing acquaintance with Jewish mothers. Your mother _might_ not kill you if you miss the marriage. This weather _will_ kill you if you try to drive this car, tonight, through this storm."

"Thank you for your concern. I can't say I'm happy to be driving this toy, but I'm going to, unless you refuse to rent it."

"Oy Vey, no offense, but you're an idiot, Mr. Butters." He looked very upset. "I've already inspected this car five times today and five sane people have turned it down. Give it a once over, I know where all its warts are."

_I'm almost sorry to rent this car from him. He really seems to care. Everything built after 1973 is a piece of junk anyway._

I walked around the car and didn't see anything that looked like a problem. As I was finished my walk around the pregnant roller-skate car-thing, I happened to look up and saw something beautiful.

Three rows of cars over, in the farthest parking spot from the terminal entrance, was a 1968 Roadrunner. It had been black and red once, but was now orange, rust, and bondo, with some salt and black highlights. Written in soap on the back window was 'FOR SALE 4,500 - RUNS OK - 426 NOT ORIGINAL - FIXERUPPER - CALL 416-244-2337'

I was immediately transfixed in fascination. "You have got to be kidding me."

"Are you ready to go inside and sign your death warrant yet, Mr. Butters? Or have you decided to embrace sanity and rent a hotel room or sleep in the terminal?" The rental agent was standing nearby, hands in his pockets, shoulders hunched.

"Do you know who's selling that car, Alex?" _I think his name was Alex. _I looked at his name tag. _OK, yes, he's Alex._ I turned back towards the Roadrunner and started walking towards it.

"The Roadrunner over there?" I looked back at him as he spoke. He looked at me a little funny. "Yeah, I know who's selling it. Why?"

"Because they just sold it, if it runs, doesn't have any critical issues, and they can get me keys within an hour or two." As I walked closer, I could see that the old muscle car had chains on it's tires already.

"Deal." Alex said from behind me. I heard keys jingle and turned around to see him holding a key ring with a Warner Brothers Roadrunner on it.

I almost fell as I stumbled, and was stunned speechless for a few seconds.

Alex shrugged. "I just decided to sell it yesterday. I can't do it justice. There are a couple parts cars too, but those would be a separate sale."

_Sometimes this whole knight of the cross thing is just absurd. _I thought, as we walked back indoors to talk about the car.

_I need a new bird anyway._ _That thing at the docks last month did so much damage to the old bird that it was going to take forever to fix._

As we walked in, Alex looked at the counter, where no people were waiting, and then at the clock. He breathed a sigh of relief before clocking out and putting a 'Closed Due to Weather' sign on the counter.

After a few minutes, the deal was sealed. We ripped up the rental agreement for the pregnant roller-skate car-thing that I hadn't signed yet, and waited for Alex's wife to show up with the Roadrunner's title.

_I never thought about just buying a 426 Hemi separately and having it put into a 383 model. From what Alex was telling me, his dad put a lot of work into it before he died, but that was years ago. Alex doesn't have time or inclination to fix it up right. This bird will be a blast to drive when I get it fixed up. Andi will love it._

Alex's wife drove up a few minutes later in a pickup truck so big that the Roadrunner could have parked in the cargo bed. When I first saw it, I did a double-take. _Wow. That thing is bigger than Michael's work truck._

Alex walked out to get the title so his wife didn't have to get out of the gigantic truck. She then pulled the beast-truck away from the curve and parked out next to the Roadrunner. The massive plumes of grey coming out of the dual vertical exhaust pipes clearly indicated she wasn't turning off the engine. I briefly considered the sheer amount of fuel that the truck had to burn, but had to back down from that thought. It might actually get better mileage than the Roadrunner. The 383 Roadrunners I've had in the past were fuel hogs. The 426 would probably be worse.

I checked the VIN against the number I had written down from the car's dashboard VIN plate. _Match._ I walked over to the nearest ATM and withdrew forty-six hundred dollars from my personal account, since I'd be keeping the car.

As the money came out of the ATM, Alex goggled. He'd firmly insisted in watching the machine dispense the money, clearly not willing to accept cash out of my backpack. Very few people carried almost five thousand dollars in legit cash on them. I firmly insisted that he turn his back while I entered my PIN. We both agreed, and the deal was done three minutes later.

"I didn't even think it was possible to get that much money all at once out of one of these little portable ATM's. They usually have limits around two or three hundred dollars." Alex scratched his head. "Sorry to doubt you."

With a grin, I signed on the line, commenting as I did so. "You said you had a couple parts cars, too. Here's my card. Call me in two days and let's deal."

He handed me the keys. I handed him the money and my consultancy card. The extra hundred dollars was for the key ring, six bags of sand, two orange warning flags, admittedly ancient snow chains, ice scraper, snow shovel, bag of cat litter, funnel, case of oil, and gallon of antifreeze. He tossed in the air pressure gauge with Wiley Coyote head for free.

A few minutes later, Alex had finished moved all his stuff from the car to the truck. I shook his hand again, he promised to call me, and then he and his wife pulled away in the giant truck. As he was moving his stuff between vehicles, I hadn't been able to help but ask about the truck. He had explained that it was actually a semi-tractor converted into a pickup truck. His father-in-law, a lottery winner, had given it to them.

_I guess I'm not the only lucky one._

Within seconds of Alex and his wife leaving, I was inside the car, letting it warm up and listening carefully to the sounds it was making while I pulled Bob's box out of the backpack.

Bob's voice came out of the box. "I've been listening, Boss, and I think we're in for another of those 'special days'."

_He's right. Everything has been falling perfectly for me, even more than normal. Especially the car._

Bob continued. "It drives me nuts that I can't tell how it's done."

_Not this conversation again._ "They wouldn't be miracles if we understand how they worked, would they?"

"True." He paused. "Sorry Boss, let me stay out of the backpack and open the box for the duration of the trip, and I won't complain about metaphysical mysteries of the greater powers."

"Haha. Deal." I unzipped the main compartment, pulled out Bob's box, and then folded back the top.

"Whew. Thanks, Boss. I know you washed them, and I'm _very_ grateful that you did, but sixteen hours in a box full of t-shirts and socks gets old."

The heater worked well. The car didn't seem to have any of the problems that Alex had warned me about. All of the gauges worked. There was no softness in the clutch. It looked like crap from the outside, and the inside was ratty, but mechanically the thing ran at least as well as my old bird ever had.

_More reality tweaks. Bob's certainly right. I'm starting to get nervous._

I pulled Fidelacchius out of my left-side inner jacket pocket, and pulled the small rare-earth magnet out of Bob's box. I held the sword carefully with my left hand while I used my right to put the magnet near the roof of the car, close to the windshield, above the rear-view mirror. I gingerly moved my hand closer and closer to the roof until the extremely powerful magnet leaped off my hand and slammed into the roof of the car with a loud thump, almost like a hammer blow. Then I put the sword in my right hand and put it next to the magnet as well. The sword pulled up hard, but the steel in the sword hilt was surrounded by wood, so it didn't crash into the magnet like the magnet had crashed into the roof. At the same time, it took effort to pull it off the magnet. I pulled it away from the magnet a couple times just to be sure it would come away without a problem. The magnet mount was a new idea.

I pulled out a pair of sunglasses from my right-side inner jacket pocket and put them on "Its 106 miles to Chicago..."

There was a near instant objection. "Stop." Bob begged. "Not that quote again. Besides, I'm not wearing sunglasses and neither of us smokes."

I grinned, took the sunglasses off, carefully placing them on Bob's skull. After being pleasantly surprised by the radio's features, I pulled out a USB stick with music on it. I plugged the USB into the very modern audio equipment in the old car. _Too bad this stereo system won't survive Harry sneezing near it._

The music started. Bob groaned once, but knew better than to be too vocal about it. Sweet, sweet polka began streaming forth as we drove to a nearby gas station, topped off the fuel, checked other fluids, and double-checked all the tires, including the spare.

I used a little glass cleaner and some of the scratchy brown paper towels supplied by the gas station to remove the soap 'FOR SALE' message from the back windshield. Then I grabbed the sword from the magnet and pocketed it before I went into the store and picked up some energy drinks, snack food, and a paper map.

_Knight of the Sword being shot in the convenience store would be an embarrassment, and this neighborhood doesn't look so great._

After I dropped the drinks and snacks next to Bob's box, I pulled the sword out of my pocket and returned it to the magnet. Then I pulled the package of lozenges with different color wrappers out of my jacket pocket and put it in the very clean, unused ashtray, before starting to take off my jacket.

_Bad idea._ With all the crazy luck I'd been having, something big was happening soon. I put the lozenges back in my jacket pocket, and then turned the heat down a little, so I could wear the jacket in the car and not sweat.

The storm that forced my plane to stop in Toronto had hit with full force by the time we started to travel. I pulled out my smartphone and used the map app to plot a way home, and we were on the way at twenty-five miles per hour, idling in second gear.

_I wonder if the engine is going to stay in top condition after the current mess gets handled?_

It took me a couple seconds to realize that I had basically just equated some fantastically powerful being, who might just be God, with an auto mechanic. I hoped they either didn't hear, or thought it was funny.

_Sorry. Really. But thanks for the car! Even if the engine blows up after whatever you have planned is finally done._

For the next couple miles I waited for lightning to strike, but it didn't happen.

About an hour later, my eyes dragged themselves up to the hilt of the sword for the twentieth time, specifically to the nail, barely visible, worked into the base of the hilt_. I really need to talk with Rabbi Bebi again. It's hard to keep the faith when I'm carrying an object with this much power, and it 'just happens' to have extremely powerful Christian connections. The fact that Sanya manages to be agnostic while actually carrying his Sword blows my mind._

Bob was flipping through his book reader, occasionally tapping with a stylus suspended in the air, but he was apparently paying attention to me too. "Awful quiet over there Boss, and you keep looking at the sword. You having those feelings of religious inadequacy again?"

I sighed. "Bob, you might understand magic and rituals, but please stay away from discussing my personal religion. I know you mean well, but you don't understand. You're too rational about everything related to magic and the higher powers to understand human religion." I had a thought. _Wonder how he'll react._ "Maybe that's why you can't see how the greater powers do the weirdly improbable things that we see when our lives are about to become interesting?"

"Boss, if I didn't know better, I would think that you just made an offer to proselytize me." Bob didn't say anything else, continuing to tap on the book reader with the stylus every now and then.

_Thought so. The thought of faith without complete understanding probably gives Bob about as much of a headache as that nail gives me._

Something short and brown, with four legs, ran across the road in the heavy snowfall, barely visible about thirty feet in front of the car. I slammed on the brakes and the chains on the tires squealed and scraped as they skidded along the snow-covered ice. I immediately let off the brakes and blew the horn as half a dozen mongrel dogs with no collars crossed the road. They managed to get out of my way before the bird ran them down. The dogs were all carrying what looked like bits of clothing, and I saw a few pieces break free as they lopes across the snowed-over road.

_Wild dogs carrying pieces of clothing. Potentially very bad. _"Bob, it looks like we found what we were being guided to. Ready to move?"

Bob was already hovering over the back console, looking behind us through the back window at the road. I hadn't even seen him leave his box. "Open the window, Boss, I need to grab a few pieces of that cloth before it blows away."

I cranked down the window for Bob as I carefully slowed the bird down and guided it off the road. Snowplows had been through a couple times, but they hadn't piled the snow up so high that the bird couldn't get most of the way off the road.

As soon as Bob was out of the car, I rolled the window back up all the way. After parking, I put the transmission in neutral and the emergency brake on. I did not turn on the flashers because I wasn't sure about how good the battery was, or how long we'd be away. I looked at my smartphone's map app. Thirty miles out of Toronto. The next three minutes was a whirlwind of making sure I was ready, and marking the car with orange flags; hopefully the plows wouldn't bury it.

When I got out of the car, the snow was falling quickly, and the wind was gusting heavily. _Too Cold!_ I jumped back into the car and took yet another three minutes to get the second pair of thermals out of my backpack and put them on under my loose jeans. _Still going to be damn cold in this weather._

I ducked into the car and looked around one more time, patting each pocket as I thought about the things I should have. It looked like I had everything useful. Sword. Bag of lozenges. Phone, powered off. Keys. Various little magical tricks Bob and I had put together. I grabbed the two remaining small packs of trail mix for good measure. _How did Michael always seem to be ready at a moment's notice for this stuff? _ A second later, I shrugged and picked up the backpack. _It's not that heavy._

Bob was floating in the air, off to the side of the road, next to a few pieces of cloth that were being held in the air by his orange aura.

A little bit impatiently, I asked "Do you have anything yet?"

Bob just said "Working."

I didn't say anything else. He'd talk when he had something to tell me, location spells were pretty easy, usually, so he would probably be giving me something soon.

About thirty seconds later, Bob responded. "Clothing from two people, one male, one female. The man is a practitioner, the woman wasn't. I can't tell where the man is right now, just that he's not dead. The woman appears to be scattered in a line between a spot about a hundred feet off the road this way," Bob turned and faced the embankment on our side of the road, "and about fifteen hundred feet away in the opposite direction, where the dogs went, with the larger concentrations of her at both ends."

_Too late for the woman. Need to find the man._

I stomped my boots to make sure they were fitted right and headed down the embankment, slowly and carefully, looking for a suitable small tree. When I found a straight sapling about wrist-thick, I activated the sword with a thought. The arm-length bar of silver-white light that sprang into existence was capable of cutting anything I'd ever tried to cut, with little effort. The tall, thin sapling took two swift cuts to chop into a staff. Then I de-activated the sword and continued down the embankment until I was on level ground.

I leaned the newly cut staff against my shoulder. Rummaging around in my left front pocket with gloves on was annoying._ I know it's in here._ After a few seconds I found the big, round convention pin in my left pocket and set it on top of the new staff. After the bottle-cap-shaped piece of metal was in place, I tapped it three times fast, three times slow, and three times fast again with my right index finger, carefully keeping my left hand well away from the top end of the staff. On the last tap, the little piece of metal lunged down the staff at least two inches on all sides and clamped into place, creating a metal-shod top for the staff. _There. Bob's battery is ready._

Bob settled into place on the staff. "Thanks Boss, I needed the recharge."

I shrugged. "It was your power to begin with, Bob."

I followed the backtrail of the dogs that had been dragging the human woman's remains away. "Bob, remind me to let the authorities know that there's a pack of wild dogs in this area that have eaten human flesh."

"Sure thing. On the list. Prioritize it?"

"Yes, please. Can't have them going after a kid on a camping trip or something." When I saw the side of the upside-down van, I did a double-take. I'd seen plenty of buildings and vehicles that had had their doors ripped off by various supernaturally strong creatures. Most supernatural creatures couldn't abide by the touch of iron, but cars had paint on them. Usually. As a result, most supernatural creatures that regularly dealt with humans understood how car doors worked, even if they were very nervous about touching cars. The aluminum and plastic modern cars were starting to change that. Full size vans were still steel construction though, as far as I knew, and these doors had been pushed in. I stopped moving, and activated the sword.

"Any ideas what broke into the van?" I asked.

"Not from here. I don't see tracks leading away either, at least not tracks that aren't dog tracks."

"Closer it is then." I walked up to the van, my sword still active. When I was a few feet away from the van, Bob muttered something.

"What was that, Bob?"

"I'm hoping I'm wrong. Don't step to the right of the entry hole, something steeped in very powerful black magic was there recently. I don't think its residue would hurt you now but I'd rather not find out."

I moved a little left as I approached the hole. Looking at the positions of the large, hand-shaped marks on the door, I realized I had made a mistake. "Bob. Nothing broke in, something broke out. It reached through the broken windows and just wrenched the doors inwards."

"Even better." Bob muttered sarcastically as he floated over to a diagram drawn in dark red on the ceiling of the van, which was now the floor. After a moment, he muttered to himself briefly and then commented. "Someone with a whole lot of talent and no sense at all created a beacon to attract help, without defining the help, where it would come from, or what limits constrained it. Nobody should ever teach these shortcuts." He paused, detached himself, and hovered over the ritual circle. "They created it after the wreck. I recognize some aspects of this work. Carl Baskins. Harry worked with me to make sure a major project of Carl's didn't have any aspect of coercion in it. He was able to design a ritual to make people believe his online dating site ads were true, trying to find someone who was really a match for him. It was truly brilliant work. Harry couldn't make heads or tails of it. I had to actually tear the plans for it down to basics and rebuild it twice before I fully understood it." Bob muttered to himself for a moment. "What was he doing here?"

I blinked. "He was that good and made a beacon this irresponsible?"

"The symbology is solid here, Boss, but the handwriting is terrible, and the example diagrams I saw from him before were like engineering documents. Based on that, I'd say Carl was in this van, made this circle, and was probably hurting badly when he did it. What worries me is that some of his handwriting ran together in a couple places, and instead of causing the diagram to fail, I can see that energies moved outside of normal pathways. I can also tell that a lot more power than Carl could ever handle was used to create the beacon. He used some sort of empowered item to feed power into the diagram. Probably a ring. Look at the center. You can see where something the size of a finger ring was removed from the diagram."

Bob then started expounding on circle and diagram theory as well as energy channeling on chaotic channels. While it was interesting, I wasn't listening any longer, because I had seen what was left of the woman. The dogs had scattered the pieces around a bit, but I had seen what dogs did to a body before, and it was clear even after the dogs had been at the body that something far more clinical had been done here. All the fatty organs and brain had been extracted and presumably consumed. The long bones had been sliced out, and there was a pile of bone chips in a pile next to where the pool of blood where the corpse had obviously been originally, which looked to be about the right size to be the fractured remnants of the long bones of the arms and legs._ It ate the marrow._ I was an experienced coroner, and I damn near lost my lunch anyway. "Damn Bob, what eats like this, and how can it possibly have answered a call for help?"

"I can think of a few things, and none of them are very pretty." Bob turned to look at the remains. "Loup garou, wendigo, some larger goblins, trolls, even feral ogres if they don't have a fire to cook." He turned away from the many pieces of corpse and back to the diagram. "As for the help part, that body isn't Carl."

I shook my head to keep myself from getting angry. _Every time I get comfortable with Bob and think of him as a person, he scares the hell out of me with his coldness. _He's not human. _He's really going on about this diagram though. He rarely gets this excited about anything magical._

"Unfortunately, from what I see here, Carl's handwriting might have created, by accident, an energy pattern capable of reaching deep into the Nevernever. This error here and that error there compound the energy." Bob was pointing at spots on the diagram with a hovering twig. The twig froze in the air and Bob's voice paused. The twig made dozens of rapid, precise movements around the circle in a period of a few seconds. "Boss this isn't an accident. The handwriting is bad, but the connections between words were intentional. He created a recursive accumulator diagram."

I wasn't following. We'd never discussed recursive accumulator diagrams that I could remember. "A what?"

"A recursive accumulator takes in power and generates more power than it uses. It recursively processes that power again and again, increasing the total power in the system on each pass. It's supposed to be impossible, but I can see now that it's not. This is incredible work, but so crudely drawn. Like a Mona Lisa in crayon. Drawing the diagram in the blood of a dead woman was brilliant. Essence of birth and death combined. I can see how it made this work here..."

I shuddered at Bob's clinical analysis and tuned him out again. I was still staring at the woman's remains, and looked around for a few seconds. Getting positive ID would not be impossible. The teeth appeared mostly intact. After a few seconds, I interrupted Bob. "What does it mean? Simple words for now."

"I don't know what it means." Bob sounded hushed.

"What?" It shocked me that Bob was admitting ignorance about something magical that a human designed.

"It's beyond me. Sorry Boss. I have absolutely no idea how far this call for help might have reached, or what may have answered it. He could have summoned an Outsider for all I know, or something from even farther out, if there even is a farther out, and the diagram would have had the power to bring it here if it found a target. Remember, he didn't define anything. Just a really big, loud scream for help, from anyone."

"And here we are." I muttered.

The floating skull turned to face me. "Indeed. I want to put a small amount of power into this, Boss, and see what it does."

I immediately held out my hand in a stop motion. "Wait. Bob, if you put power into it, the diagram will feed power into itself like a perpetual motion machine. Better than a perpetual motion machine, right? Feeding on itself, multiplying the power you gave it, generating a hugely powerful random call for help that anything can answer?"

"Yes." Bob sounded a little quiet. "But I think it would come to help us, if I activated it."

"No. Sorry Bob, I know it's got to be fascinating to you, but we can't energize this thing. Can you see if it found a target?"

The skull sank an inch or so in the air, and Bob's voice sounded disappointed. "It did. One of the targets took the power source. I can tell that from the feedback resonance."

_Better and better. Not._ "I'm sorry, Bob, I zoned out on you a couple times there while you were explaining. Targets, as in more than one?"

"Two at least, maybe three. The first trigger was very early. Probably the spot of evil next to the van that I told you to avoid. The second came a good bit later, at least an hour or so. The third, if it is separate, is somehow still part of the second. Independent but dependent. I can't begin to understand them without seeing them."

Bob's skull floated around in the van, looking at various spots before approaching the side of the van to the right of the ripped doors. "Definitely a wendigo."

"At least we know how to fight a wendigo, right?" I asked, trying to remember all I could about them.

Bob was silent for several seconds. "I don't know if your sword will hurt a wendigo. They are a lot like loup garou. They can be trapped, but killing them requires heirloom silver. The biggest differences that matters to us right now is that loup garou change back after the full moon while wendigo ignore the moon. The wendigo is a temporary curse, and will abandon it's host when they are sated. The wendigo will use the host's memories to target family and friends first before random people. Strongest social connections first, typically. They will not hesitate to kill anyone that gets in their way, but they rarely ever consume anyone that isn't a social connection. Dozens of kills at a minimum before a wendigo will leave its human host, sometimes hundreds if the wendigo expends a great deal of energy travelling or making kills." Bob paused a moment. "The human host will usually suicide after separation, because the memory of what the wendigo did with their body remains after the sated wendigo spirit leaves the host. Shortly after leaving it's host, the wendigo spirit reforms as a small figurine, normally wooden, sometimes bone."

I tried to put the pieces together. "So, there was a wendigo spirit by the van somehow? Carl created the help diagram, which somehow empowered or woke the wendigo spirit, and since there were no limits on the request, the wendigo spirit figured out some way that it's possession of Carl would be considered help, and was then able to take him over, without any of the typical submission requirements for spiritual possession?"

"Exactly."

"Now there's another entity, possibly two, from some completely unknown place that was drawn here and will now try to help Carl, who is now a wendigo?"

"Yes."

"Can you track them?" I asked as I cut the little diagram out of the floor/ceiling of the van with the sword.

Bob snorted. "They took her ring. I can follow them."

I wanted to destroy the diagram, but from what Harry had told me about how the Archive worked, I couldn't really destroy information that was written down by a human. I could destroy this diagram after we handled Carl. I could tell Bob to forget it, and pressure him into actually doing it. The Archive, Ivy, would never forget it - not on my say-so. Ivy might not be able to forget it, for all I knew. _Harry and I are going to have a little talk when this is over, and I'm going to hope that he can convince Ivy to leave this alone, or hide it, or even delete it._

"Can you send them back?" _Please say yes._

"No, not without understanding this diagram better." Bob's hovering skull moved up to the top of the new-cut staff and attached itself to the end-cap battery there, rotating to look me in the eyes. "Don't destroy it Boss, or they might be trapped here. We have no clue how powerful they are, or if they would make good neighbors."


	4. Chapter 4

**4th Draft - 12/31 1645 EST

* * *

><p>Chapter 4: Clear Trail<p>

Blake and Evan manage to catch up to the monster they are hunting.

* * *

><p><em>It isn't making any effort to hide its tracks, and it's running in an almost straight line.<em>

Looking ahead and scanning in front of me, I followed the beast's tracks. They looked almost human, except the toes were heavily clawed, and the claws remained extended even when running, a lot like a dog's. The feet were very large too, but not giant. A really big human might have feet the same size. The gaps between footprints were definitely not human. Based on the extraordinary distance between footprints and the fact that it was throwing up bits and pieces of frozen dirt along its back trail, it was definitely a powerful runner, but it was also very heavy.

I really wished Evan could fly at that point. I felt exposed, and I knew that if the thing had any intelligence at all, and it was still suspicious from almost detecting us three times at the van, it was going to try to set a trap for anyone following it.

Then I considered the storm. Visibility between thirty and fifty feet, even with my vision - which was rather good at night. _With visibility this bad, I'm not sure Evan being able to fly would do us much good. He can see much better than I can, but he can't see through obstacles, like heavy curtains of snow. This is a bad storm._

Shaking my head, I stopped woolgathering. The thing we were chasing was clearly not all that smart, since it pulled the doors off the van by pulling inwards, rather than pushing them out. _Unless it was simply so strong that it didn't care that one way would be easier than the other. Or maybe it's just clueless about mechanical stuff._

I continued running and thinking, following the tracks, holding the Hyena at the ready, prepared for ambush. Unlike the monster we were chasing, I ran on top of the snow. A few seconds with a couple bushes shortly after we started the chase had allowed me to absorb some branches and expand my feet like snowshoes. My feet weren't anywhere near the size of real snowshoes, but with my low weight, they didn't need to be. The extra width gave me enough surface area to run on top of the snow, and would let me dig into the snow with a great deal of surface area if I needed to maneuver. If we caught up to the monster, whatever it was, I wanted all the maneuverability I could get.

The monster's trail turned left slightly, and the tracks changed. Something was different. _No more dirt and leaves mixed in with the trail._

I peered ahead, looking at the tracks I could see. Why were they suddenly no longer marked by loose dirt and leaves? Based on the spacing of the tracks, our quarry didn't appear to have slowed down.

I, however, slowed down, then stopped, and Evan immediately commented "What's wrong?"

Raising my hands in front of my mouth to muffle my voice, I spoke when the wind grew louder. "The tracks changed, Evan, just being careful."

Evan spoke into my right ear. "The dirt and leaves missing from it's trail? It's running along the stream bed, towards the lake. The ice is thick enough that it's not gouging dirt out of the ground with its nails any longer. If you look close you can see it's throwing up chunks of ice instead."

I saw that he was right when I looked closer. I considered that it was now running towards the lake. A wide, flat tabletop of ice, which would likely have little in the way of heavy snow buildup. The monster had foot claws and was very heavy, which let it get traction on ice. I had snowshoe feet and almost no weight, ice would be about the worst possible terrain for me to fight something very strong and heavy.

Stepping out onto that ice would be a death sentence for me, I was almost certain. If the beast had any intelligence at all, and any caution or concern about being followed, the lake's surface would be a trap. It's where I would try to ambush a pursuer if I were in its shoes.

_I might be building this thing up too much in my mind, but thinking it's stupid could be a deadly mistake._

I lifted my hands to my mouth again, and whispered as the wind blew. "Coming from this side of the lake, Evan, if you wanted to set up an ambush to let you run back along your back trail and catch a pursuer, where would you come off the lake for the best ambush point? I know this lake is probably a little different, but as far as I remember, the lake was never developed along the shore, other than the marina and a few private docks. I haven't seen any sign of development here either."

Evan thought for a few moments, then hopped around a little and started speaking in my ear again. "If the monster has been living around here long enough to know the lake, it could have made all sorts of hiding places. If not, visibility is so bad the best bet would be just to cross straight over. I've got no good answers here, Blake"

_I'm not going out on the lake chasing this thing._

Evan and I chose widdershins and wasted twenty minutes running around the lake. As we returned to where the monster's tracks went out onto the lake ice, I was annoyed. "Did we miss where it came off the lake, Evan?"

"No, Blake, not unless it miraculously got a lot better at hiding it's tracks. All the rocks were covered by snow, so it didn't jump from rock to rock. I watched for that trick. It's still on the ice. Maybe it froze to death?"

"Can an Other freeze to death?" I muttered under my breath, thinking the answer was no.

Evan heard me and cut straight to the point. "Not in this weather. Not in our world. Well, maybe fire or heat based Others. But we're not in our world, and he didn't look like a heat-based Other." He paused. "I'm not really sure. All I know is what I read over other people's shoulders when they were reading about magic stuff. I learned a lot, but there were a whole lot of words I didn't know."

_Did Ty, Tiff, Alexis, or Rose even consider that Evan could read, and how good his vision is?_

I stepped out onto the ice. "This feels like a trap, Evan. Extra careful please."

Evan hopped a couple times on my shoulder, then jumped up onto my head. "OK Blake. I'm on it. I'll knock on wood if I see something." A moment later, he pecked lightly at the branches that defined the shape of my head, and commented. "Testing, testing."

I smiled and slowly moved out onto the lake, carefully following the path left by the claws of the monster. _Man is supposed to be the most dangerous game, but I don't think that author ever hunted Others._

My thoughts drifted a bit at the thought of hunting Others._ Am I really unable to resist being drawn into scenarios where the only option is fighting, unless I am distracted, like Alister was saying? I don't feel like I'm picking fights, or avoiding non-fighting solutions. Fights always seem to find me. I just don't turn away from them._

After a couple minutes of slow forward progress, Evan pecked me on the head, lightly enough that I didn't hear it, I only felt it. My inner rational person tried to make sense of how I could feel but not hear something tapping on me in a body made of wood and bone, but rational Blake gave up. Rational Blake had been losing ground for weeks, even before Ur.

I stopped carefully. Evan hopped over to my left ear and demanded, quietly. "Put me in your left hand again, the same thing we did before, at the van."

Slowly, I moved my hand as requested, and a few seconds later as I looked down Evan's wing as if it was some old style iron-sighted rifle barrel, Evan showed me what he had spotted. About sixty feet away, intermittently visible in the heavily falling snow, if I squinted, was an arm. A very large arm. Not impossibly large for a human. If the body were to human proportions, the monster would be the size of an extremely big man. It was almost entirely covered with short white fur, with a tuft of much longer fur hanging off its elbow, blowing wildly in the wind. The palm was pitch black as were its heavy claws.

I watched, motionless for at least five minutes. The arm was immobile, sitting on top of the ice, palm down, fingers and claws pressing against the ice, like someone lying face down getting ready to push themselves up off the floor. Everything beyond the shoulder seemed to be buried in the ice.

There was no movement from the monster at all. I moved a little closer. From the slightly closer vantage point, I noted a large pattern of fracture marks in the ice where the ice had collapsed inwards from a single point. It looked like our monster had been running across the lake and hit a weak spot and fallen in. The pattern started about ten feet from me. The broken shards of ice were chaotically angled against one another where pieces had frozen together. Some pieces of the ice were stacked up on top of one another where the beast had presumably struggled to get out of the water. It seemed like the ice was around two inches thick before it had broken, and it was already refrozen at the surface solidly enough that none of the ice flexed in the wind.

Evan was hopping back and forth on my head. "Good it's dead." He seemed to be in good humor.

I wasn't so sure. I wanted to be sure. Green Eyes had been able to live under this very same lake when it was frozen.

_Green Eyes._ I closed my eyes a moment, then brought my thoughts back to the now. _Worry about later, later._

I didn't need to breathe, I had no idea if this monster needed to. It might just be trapped in the ice, not dead. I moved slowly, carefully over the shattered, refrozen ice, getting closer. Carefully, moving slowly, each step accompanied by a delay to feel if there was any movement of the ice.

When I was about five feet from the body, my weight collapsed a crust of ice that had formed over a shallow drift of snow on the surface of the lake. A small cracking noise, and I fell a quarter inch. The ice beneath the bit of drifted snow held my weight without difficulty, immobile, and I relaxed.

The monster's fingers, claw tips pressed against the ice, twitched. Then the ice began to crack loudly and heave. I felt the ravenous hunger again. _It froze itself partially under the lake to block its vision, hearing, and sense of smell, and was using only touch to try to detect whoever might be following it. I knew it was a trap. I still came out on the ice knowing it was a trap. Alister might just be right._

I didn't even look at the monster as I turned and ran directly away from it. Any direction would take me to the lake shore. I needed to be on snow to fight it, for my best mobility. I could feel Evan clutching my hair with his claws, and knew he would be trying to break connections. I could feel that it wasn't working. The hunger would wane, briefly, and then return.

"We're too close!" I shouted. "Help me open up distance!"

I heard a very loud sloshing, splashing noise behind me, punctuated with the sounds of ice knocking together as I felt the wind across the lake gather at my back, helping to push me, accelerate me, away from the hole in the ice.

"On it!" Evan shouted. I felt him grip my hair more tightly, and there was a rhythmic pressure on the hair, like a heartbeat. I suspected Evan was beating his wings like as if he were flying, but gripping my hair because he couldn't fly with his injuries.

There was a tremendous splash behind me, and I imagined the monster had let itself sink to the bottom of the lake and then leaped up and out. I heard multiple light thumps that sounded like hard objects hitting one another, as well as one very loud, softer sounding thump. There was a shower of small pieces of ice and a spray of water cascading over me as I ran, making me fairly certain I was right. I felt the ice vibrate strongly under my feet and the ravenous hunger got even more intense. It was hard to think. I wasn't afraid. That was a sensation I hadn't experienced in a while, but I was beginning to have difficulty thinking coherently as the hunger from the beast behind me crowded out my own thoughts.

I was having a hard time getting traction on the ice, skating with Evan's help more than running, but the monster wasn't having that difficulty. More heavy thumps sounded behind me as the beast began to run, the timing between each successive thump was rapidly decreasing as the sounds were growing louder and the hunger grew more overpowering. I heard ice cracking with each thump.

I was about fifty feet shy of the nearest trees, when Evan shrieked "Blake!" I felt myself being pushed to my right, as a head-sized chunk of ice hummed through the air beside me and exploded into ice shrapnel in front of me. Most of the fragments from the explosion of ice sprayed harmlessly in front of me. Immediately after that, I felt myself being pushed left as another chunk of ice passed me on the other side. Another explosion of ice in front of me, with no harm done.

Evan had helped me dodge the two incoming projectiles, but in order to do so, he'd stopped pushing me forward, away from the monster. The side to side motion, right, and then left, in quick succession caused a worse problem than just slowing down my forward acceleration though - I lost traction on the ice and fell.

The hunger behind me peaked as I fell, but there was no sound from the hunter. As I wildly tumbled across the ice, I caught my first glimpse of the beast, other than its arm. In silhouette, the monster appeared human, but it was clothed only in white fur. The face was covered with white fur except for a minimal amount of pitch black facial skin around the eyes, nose, and the lips. The gripping surfaces of the hands and feet were the same pitch black, as were the claws. Heavy tufts of long white fur at each major joint, and at the hips. My first impression was that it was very precise in appearance, almost like a show dog, cleanly groomed. My second impression was that it was extremely focused on me as I tumbled across the ice, less than ten feet in front of it. It was running towards me with arms extended like a goalie chasing a loose ball.

I managed to get my legs underneath me and leap, but it wasn't a clean leap. A hand gripped my lower calf, and I immediately stabbed the forearm connected to that hand strongly with the Hyena. There was a howl of pain as the monster threw me violently, back towards the center of the lake, keeping me on the surface where it had an advantage.

I skidded across the ice for twenty feet or so, then rolled to my feet and kept moving in that direction. My lower right leg was damaged from the monster's grip and throw, but could still support my weight. After a few moments trying to run in the direction I had been thrown, it was clear that even though it could support me weight, my injured leg was slowing me down too much. I would easily be run down, even with Evan trying to help, so I turned to face the monster.

"Evan Do what you can to help me be faster, and slow it down. Any little bit will help."

"Sure thing." He replied, sounding confident.

I tapped my chest, and Evan fluttered off my head to my shoulder, before disappearing into my chest cavity.

The monster was standing about thirty feet away from me, holding its bleeding right arm, looking at the wound with apparent confusion. Then it roared at me, exposing teeth that looked very human, except with exaggerated incisors, and charged on all fours, looking a lot like a charging gorilla from a nature show.

I couldn't count on being able to move from side to side on the ice. With the lack of traction, the only reliable direction to move was up, so I jumped up as it ran at me, right before I was within its reach. I felt myself get a little boost from Evan as I jumped.

The monster seemed to have been expecting my jump, and didn't hesitate as it also jumped on the last step it took before reaching where I had been. Evan apparently worked against it, as I saw it move a little to the side in the air while reaching towards me, twisting as it passed underneath me. I sliced its left wrist heavily as it grasped towards me.

The monster lost its footing and slid across the ice a short way, before righting itself and standing back up rapidly. Its right forearm and left wrist were bleeding on the ice, and it snarled at me, clearly infuriated. I started backing away from it, hoping it would be cautious enough to allow me to get off the ice.

No such luck. It pressed the attack, starting to walk towards me rapidly, and the projected aura of hunger grew to enormous proportions. I could barely think. I didn't dare turn my back on it, so I started walking sideways, looking for anything protruding from the surface of the ice that I might use for a spot of resistance to give me the option of rapid sideways movement. I saw nothing useful. The monster's foot claws dug heavily into the ice with every step giving it traction that I envied.

It sped up until it was walking at a near-jog, confident, arms held in front of it with elbows extended away from it's body, a lot like a greco-roman wrestler. As it approached within a few feet, it reached out towards me again, with its right arm. I saw the tension in its left side building. The right arm attack was clearly a feint. I struck anyway, and severed the pinkie and ring fingers of its right hand. The left side attack never came as the monster stopped, standing still, staring back and forth between its fingers laying on the ice and it's right hand.

The monster was bleeding out slowly on the ice. Its reaction to injury seemed to be more confusion than pain, which made it seem to me like it was used to regenerating, or at least not used to bleeding. The Hyena would prevent healing. The monster might not even recognize the danger it was in from blood loss.

_If blood loss even effects it. It clearly didn't need to breathe under the ice, so it doesn't need blood for oxygen. I don't see gills._

Others typically didn't carry around much more body than what they needed to define themselves. If this thing didn't need blood, it probably wouldn't have blood. Like I didn't have blood. There was probably a weakness there if I lived long enough to find it.

_It's big, and I haven't opened up any arteries yet, so it's really not bleeding much. But it sounds like it's getting really angry. Not sure if that's good, or bad._

It was growling, deep in its throat, and rushed me again, arms spread wide. This time I grabbed its right hand with my left and pulled as hard as I could, while ducking, using the monster's arm as my source of leverage, since the ice offered me none. I could feel Evan accelerating my movements, and as I passed under the arm of the monster, I sliced upwards towards the white beast's right armpit as hard as I could. It managed to dodge to some degree, and I only managed to cut into its triceps, but it was still a substantial cut.

As I slid out from under it's arm and tried to open up a few feet of space between us, I stumbled as my damaged leg partially collapsed. The monster's left hand crashed onto my left upper arm, and I frantically cut the gripping hand with the Hyena, but not fast enough. I was raised into the air and dashed to the ground with tremendous force, landing flat on my back with the sound of many broken branches and bones.

The right foot of the monster pressed down on my hip, claws digging heavily into my pelvic area. I cut its leg viciously with the Hyena in my right hand as it ripped my left arm off at the shoulder. The beast looked quickly down at it's right leg, and hobbled away, still holding my left arm in it's left hand, and holding it's right calf with it's mangled right hand.

I couldn't feel Evan helping any longer. I hoped he had only been stunned by me hitting the ground. The damage to my body from being slammed on the ice and then having my left arm ripped off was severe. The structural integrity of my torso was gone. I couldn't stand. The beast was limping heavily, its right leg bleeding profusely on the ice, it's right arm bleeding heavily as well from the upper arm cut.

It snarled at me and approached again, limping, holding my left arm by my wrist as a club in its left hand. It smashed at my right arm three times with its improvised club until I lost my grip on the Hyena and the broken sword skittered away on the ice. As soon as the Hyena was out of my grasp, the beast dropped my left arm, rapidly tore off my right arm, and then ripped off both of my legs.

After the first leg was torn off, I played dead. I hoped Evan was stunned and wouldn't recover and begin to make noise. After tossing my last detached limb onto the pile of limbs next to me, the monster sniffed at my torso and head, curled its lip, and then grimaced, staring at its arms and leg.

_No fat or tasty bits here, just a little facial skin and hair, some old bones and sticks. Go bleed to death._

Tottering a bit on the leg I'd stabbed, the beast stood and walked over to where the Hyena lay, a few feet away. The leg wound was bleeding heavily, and the upper arm wound was bleeding steadily but not as much as the leg wound. The monster reached town and gingerly touched the Hyena's spiked hilt with its right index finger, then jerked the arm back and stared at its hand. I could see the blood flowing on it's fingertip. It licked its finger, and grimaced. Then looked at me and growled. I could see the pool of blood beginning to form at it's feet as it stood in one place, bleeding heavily from arm and leg.

_Die from blood loss, you bastard, and you better hope that Evan is OK, or I'll piss on your grave after I manage to fix myself back up._

A moment later, I watched as the monster hesitantly bit off the end of its right index finger. The fingertip regenerated, and was no longer bleeding. The beast spit out the chunk of finger and spit again, twice more, grimacing. Then it began biting at all of the hand and arm wounds that it could reach with its mouth. Each bite was accompanied by grimaces that weren't timed right to be pain. It was clearly not enjoying the taste of the Hyena-tainted flesh. _Or maybe it just doesn't like the taste of its own flesh._

Soon, it only had the wound on its lower right leg, and triceps remaining, both of which were still bleeding fairly heavily. It tried to reach the triceps wound with its mouth, but couldn't. It then sat on the ice and twisted its leg around, contorted its torso, and managed to bite out the entire leg wound after three attempts.

The only wound remaining was the arm wound. The beast was still bleeding, but didn't seem weak. It was feeling the wound under its right arm with it's left hand, and snarled again, this time at the Hyena, laying on the ground a few feet away from where it was sitting. After a few moments, it pulled it's left arm away again, seemingly hesitant. Then it growled loudly and reached under its right arm with its left hand once more.

After another moment's delay, the monster gripped the Hyena-damaged flesh under it's right upper arm with it's left hand, snarled, started pulling powerfully at it's own flesh. On the second pull, a mass of muscle and skin ripped almost completely loose. On the third pull it managed to rip the chunk of Hyena-damaged flesh off its arm, dropping the chunk of furred skin and ripped muscle at its feet. It licked it's hand clean of blood, making irritated noises and expressions as it did so. After a couple minutes grooming, it reached under its right arm with the left hand and brought the hand back in front of it's face. It repeated the movements several times, clearly checking for blood.

Finally, it stood and walked back over to where the pile of my parts was and settled onto its haunches. staring at me with something resembling curiosity. As it stared at me, it groomed the rest of it's body carefully, occasionally grimacing and spitting something out.

I continued playing dead, not even moving my eyes, praying that Evan wouldn't make any noise, hoping that the thing couldn't tell that I was still alive.

After grooming itself for a couple minutes, the beast sniffed the air and started sorting through the pile of my limbs, sniffing each in turn until it found my left arm, and started sniffing at the hand. It carefully sniffed around the fingers, before starting to break them off one at a time, sniffing each finger before discarding it.

_The ring. It smells the ring, or the blood on the ring._

When the pinkie finger was ripped off the brutalized remnants of my hand, a silver flash fell towards the ice and the beast grabbed it in midair.

The reaction was spectacular. When the fingers gripped the ring, the beast's hand burst into flame instantly, fur blackening in a fraction of a second as I heard it gasp in a huge breath of air. The beast then _screamed _"JENNY!" in a very human-sounding voice as it dropped the ring and panicked, scrambling away into the storm, leaving the ring spinning on the ice next to the pile of my broken and mutilated body parts.


	5. Chapter 5

**3nd Draft 12/31 1745 EST

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><p>Chapter 5: Knights of Light and Shadow<p>

Butters and Blake take each other's measure.

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><p>The world seemed to waver and quiver as I ran, and colors bled together. Hallucinations. Light tracing. Fortunately they were relatively minor. I'd dealt with worse when I was an idiot in college before I settled down and really started paying attention to my future. I stumbled.<p>

"I distinctly remember warning you that mixing the effects of alchemical formulas is generally not a good idea, Boss." Bob was being pedantic, again.

I replied while continuing to run. "You did, Bob. We also determined that the wendigo and the summoned whatever it is were way too fast for me to catch on foot without resorting to alchemical help. Did I have a better way to catch them?" _If you say yes, after saying no before, I'm going to be very angry._

I leaped over a fallen tree, carrying the new-cut staff with Bob's skull attached to it in my left hand, and the deactivated sword of faith in my right.

After a couple seconds, Bob responded. "Well, no, but Michael and Sanya never had to use alchemy."

_Is it that hard to understand, Bob?_ "Bob, you're right. If Sanya were here instead of me, a hot blonde with an AK-47 over her shoulder would have shown up on a snowmobile and offered him a ride. I, however, have you." I paused. "Let me know if I start to act irrational though, and I'll spit out the lozenges."

There was a pause of several seconds. I had been working with Bob long enough to know he was considering being a smartass again.

"Sure thing, Boss." Bob's voice gave me the impression that he got what he wanted out of the conversation.

The blue-wrapper lozenges gave me enhanced endurance. The red-wrapper lozenges gave me enhanced strength. We had specifically formulated all of the lozenges so that they shouldn't have severe reactions with one another. That had been a lot more time consuming than I liked to remember, we'd made dozens of attempts and ran hundreds of tests before I ever tried to mix any of the lozenges, and even then, it had been tiny doses at first. Sometimes there was no adverse effect at all when I mixed them, sometimes I got terrible headaches or nausea. Usually it was something minor.

I looked down at the partially filled in tracks. When we had started out, it was only the ring that we could track, but after a few hundred feet, we had picked up a physical trail. Bob recognized the wendigo's tracks immediately, but he had no idea what the other thing was. It had very large feet for its weight, barely making marks in the snow, like a rabbit.

_I really wouldn't mind all that much if Harry or Sanya would randomly show up for some ridiculous reason._ I thought _mostly_ to myself.

_Trees! Don't forget to watch for trees, idiot! _I rapidly dodged to avoid smacking into a stand of several trees.

Bob chuckled. "You're getting better at dodging, Boss."

I grunted, concentrating on following the trail and dodging trees while running at around forty miles per hour, hoping the minor hallucinations wouldn't get worse. They hadn't been debilitating yet. After a few seconds, I added to my prior requests, without even trying to pretend that I wasn't asking for help. _Thomas or Mouse would be fine too. I understand that Molly is probably too busy._

Leaving Andi and Murphy out of my list of people I wouldn't mind showing up was intentional. I didn't want Andi anywhere near something as dangerous as a wendigo, and Murphy was tough as nails but didn't have any metaphysical oomph. I didn't have the versatility to protect Murphy like Harry could when the two of them worked together. Not that I would have _ever_ said that in Murphy's hearing. _I get enough bruises in martial arts training already, thank you very much._

I had never gotten anything I actually asked for at moments like this, even if things always seemed to work out. Everything seemed to happen in ways I could not predict when I got help. _Almost like it was a game._ I shook my head. _Don't insult the metaphysical beings._

_How does Sanya reconcile all the absurdly improbable things that happen around him without a belief in a higher power? _After a moment I realized that Sanya wasn't able to use magic, and didn't have one of the world's foremost experts on magic theory telling him that the crazy things happening to him weren't actually magic. _One of those things I'll just keep my mouth shut about, I think. Keeping Bob's mouth shut about it will be harder._

The trail turned left and started following a creek bed. I stopped at the edge of the lake, and stared at the tracks. I was no tracker, but the wendigo's tracks went straight out onto the ice. The other thing's tracks went in all four directions.

"Bob, are you seeing what I'm seeing in the tracks here?" I whispered.

"Odd behavior. The snow has mostly covered the tracks leading right, but the ones coming from the left are a lot less covered. It looks like it circled ahead before coming back here and continuing to follow the wendigo."

"Why though?" I muttered, barely out loud.

Even though I really wasn't speaking to him, Bob heard and replied. "Maybe it really doesn't like open spaces? There are a few types of magical beings that would have a problem leaving a forested shore and stepping out onto a frozen lake. Dryads would probably be the most common, but I can think of a few others. Our mystery being might be analogous to one of those type magical beings." He paused. "It might even be one of those types, from our own world. The ritual diagram didn't require the help to come from someplace we wouldn't recognize."

I had been thinking logically, tactically, Bob's emotional/environmental slant made a lot of sense too. "But it came back to here, and then went out onto the ice anyway."

Bob started to sound more confident. "The wendigo hadn't left the lake then, I guess, and our unknown whatever-it-is decided that whatever hang-up it had about going out on the ice wasn't going to stop it from following the wendigo. There was a lot of power in that ritual diagram. Our forcibly summoned unknown may not have been able to resist following the wendigo."

"It hadn't left the lake?" I scanned the ground. Like Bob said, the unknown's tracks as they approached from the left were barely obscured by snow.

Everything went a little off-color for a moment. I closed my eyes briefly to let the visual hallucinations pass. "Might still be on the ice, Bob." The lozenges in my mouth were about half-gone. I took a deep breath and stepped out onto the ice. With my alchemically-enhanced strength and endurance, I could literally run like a quarterhorse, but I had to be very careful on ice.

Looking at the gashes in the ice that marked the wendigo's passage, I suppressed a strong desire for ice spikes. _Stay on target!_ I couldn't even see signs of the unknown whatever.

I couldn't go slowly, because I desperately needed to catch the wendigo, but I couldn't move quickly on the ice without risking serious injury. All of a sudden, off to my left, I saw color on the ice, red. _Damn, did it find a fisherman on the ice?_

"Boss, off to the left."

"I see it, Bob."

As I approached the blood, I saw where the ice had been broken and buckled in a large area. No sign of a fisherman's hut. No sign of a corpse.

"Again boss, there's a blood trail, off to your right now." I gripped the sword of faith, but did not activate it. When I turned my head to the right, the red spots on the ice made visual trailers.

No human fisherman would give a wendigo a fight. "I think there was a disagreement here between the wendigo and our unknown, Bob."

"Wendigo are not team players. If our unknown simply tried to approach and offer help, it would almost certainly attack." Bob commented. He was clearly concentrating on watching the surroundings.

We hadn't needed it for a while, because we'd just been following tracks, but this seemed like a good time. "Where's the ring, Bob."

Bob said nothing for a moment. The daub of the woman's blood on his forehead glowed briefly while shrinking slightly, setting off my vision again with visual trailers. "It's this way, and it's moving. Slowly."

I closed my eyes, briefly, and opened them. The glowing trailers were gone. I shrugged my shoulders to loosen them and started to walk in the direction Bob indicated, increasing my speed to a jog.

There was a tiny movement to my left. _A bird that small? At night, in this season?_ I saw a silver glint. The bird had a ring in its beak, and had its wings outspread, like it was trying to fly away, but one of the wings was hanging lower than the other.

"Bob, do you see that, or am I hallucinating?"

"I see it, and you are hallucinating. I told you that you would."

_Smartass._

The little bird, staring at us, hopped into the air and the wind carried it at least five feet before it hit the ground again. It turned away from us and started hopping, one wing extended and dragging on the ground.

I followed after the injured bird. If it were pressed, it would drop the ring to be able to move faster.

The bird looked over its shoulder at us, and hopped again, being carried another few feet by the wind.

Bob had been silent for a few seconds. "Boss, that's the lesser entity, the third one I wasn't sure if it was separate or a part of the second. It's trying to lead us away from something."

I nodded, watching the bird, gripping the sword firmly. It spun to face us and fluttered its wings.

Bob had started to turn himself around, but his head slowly returned to facing the bird. "Boss, that's the lesser foreign entity, the second one I wasn't sure if it was separate or a part of the first. It's trying to lead us away from something."

"You already said that, Bob."

"I... what?" Bob sounded confused for a second. "You little..."

There was a pause, and the bird appeared to get very agitated, fluttering madly at us.

Bob vibrated. I could feel it through my left hand on the staff. "Boss, that's the lesser..." Bob stopped. "If you do that again, it'll be sparrow season."

The sparrow cocked its head, intently, looking at me as I stared at it. Over the wind, I could barely hear a child's voice. "Nuh uh, skull season."

The silver ring shot out at Bob like a sling bullet. I reached across my body with my right arm as a shield, while pulling Bob's staff back with my left. The ring was tracking Bob even as I pulled him out of the way, but I was able to get my right arm into its path. Even through the heavy winter coat, it hit my forearm painfully. The ring fell to the ground, and I quickly picked it up, stuffing it into my left side jacket pocket.

Bob started to glow as he spoke. "Sparrow season it is then."

"Nonlethal, Bob. You said it's trying to lead us away from something. Can you catch it?"

As I placed the ring in my pocket, the bird jumped into the air and was carried another several feet from us. It stood on the ice and reared up again, shaking its wings at us. As the bird's wings vibrated, the wind reversed direction, blowing from the bird towards us, fiercely. I was unbalanced, spun around, and thrown to my knees, barely avoiding smacking Bob on the ice. The hallucinations continued to spin in my head as I closed my eyes."

Again, the child's voice, triumphant. "Skull season!"

"We want to send you back to where you came from, let us help you!" I called out towards the bird.

As I tried to stand, the winds buffeted me from every direction, alternating randomly. Bob was glowing orange, and saying nothing. On my third attempt to stand, I almost smacked Bob onto the ice again, and dropped the sword in my panic to avoid breaking his skull.

As I lunged for the sword and got it back into my hand, I heard Bob yelling. "Boss, sit on the ice if you can't stand. Please. I can't concentrate on this if I keep having to prevent you from crushing my skull on the ice!"

The sword hadn't gone far before I caught it. Heeding Bob's advice, I didn't try to stand again, but I did get to my knees. The bird was starting to glow with some sort of reddish magical effect, and I could hear Bob over the howling wind of the storm as he yelled "I said, sparrow season!"

The sparrow shuddered and stopped moving as the reddish effect surrounded it more densely.

Bob sounded strained as he spoke. "I can't hold it long, boss, it's not really strong, but it's really slippery. I don't recognize what it is, but I'm having a very hard time maintaining the capture spell."

The sparrow moved minutely inside the reddish haze, and Bob complained. "Draining power out of the battery fast, Boss."

Bob said the bird had been leading us away from something. I carefully stood and looked around the ice, then began back-tracking towards where the bird had been moving away from, while it was carrying the ring. In the shifting wind, I could see something darker on the ice, barely visible. I walked towards whatever was on the ice. As I closed the gap, I saw large splotches and smears of red.

"Someone bled a lot here, Bob. The bird's probably protecting a corpse, but I don't see it." There was a pile of what looked like kindling and small branches about twenty feet away, but I didn't see any sign of a fishing hut, so the pile of wood didn't really make sense. I ignored it for now, we needed to find the bleeder.

"Apparently the wendigo didn't want help, killed the stranger, and carried off the corpse. The bird spirit is angry and confused." Bob commented, and then I felt him vibrate. "It broke loose, boss. The bird spirit that is." After a moment he continued. "I'm going to feel that later. Give me the ring, boss, please, I need the power in it to protect us."

I hesitated. "This isn't even the wendigo, Bob, we might need that power later."

Bob voice was insistent. "Boss, I'm low on power. The bird is pissed. You don't have time to install the other battery."

An angry, disembodied child's voice came out of the wind surrounding us. "Skull season."

I heard a metallic scraping sound. A misshapen piece of metal that looked like a cross between an acacia branch and the hilt of a shattered European sword skidded across the ice towards us, picking up speed.

Bob spoke with a distinct sound of fear in his voice. "Boss, don't let that thing touch either of us. Please. I don't know exactly what it is, but its aura is potent, and ugly."

I backed up from the skittering spiky hilt, held Bob's staff a little closer to me, and mentally activated Fidelacchius's brilliant silver-white blade of light, holding it between me and the broken sword covered with spikes. "I don't want to hurt you, bird, it looks like you've been hurt already. We might be able to help."

"Where the hell am I, Hoth?" came a rough, pained voice from behind me to the right, and I damn near lost bowel control as I leapt forward and left. Or tried to. It ended up being a nearly uncontrolled skid across the ice as my enhanced strength and the lack of friction sent me into a spin.

The broken sword shot past me in the air, barely missing Bob.

I looked around frantically. "Bob, where did the voice come from? Is there something invisible here?" As I lay on my back, I juggled Bob's staff and the sword as I dug frantically in my pocket for the ring and put it in Bob's nose hole. "Ring's yours, what's happening here?"

"I'm not invisible, you just didn't see me." The pile of kindling and wood started moving. I heard the skittering sound of metal on ice again as the rough voice spoke again. "Evan, no more, for now at least."

As the pile of wood slowly and stiffly straightened itself into a human shape, stretching with some minor gasps of pain like someone stretching after a hard workout, I noticed that it had a face and hair. "Bob, how did you miss that?"

A bit defensively, he responded "I was a little bit distracted by the angry bird trying to kill us, boss."

The stickman tilted his head and looked at me, speaking in its rough voice after a few moments. "The 'angry bird' is Evan, and until you got close enough to see me, he was just trying to draw you away to protect me while I pulled myself back together. You walked towards me, and then he got more serious." He paused. "He's also injured. I am going to walk over and pick him up."

I nodded, and stood. The lozenges in my mouth were nearly gone. I did not disengage the sword, allowing its brilliant light to illuminate the area.

As the stickman walked a few feet away from us across the bloodstained ice in the driving wind and snow, I whispered "Auras, Bob. Spend a little power for a deep reading. What are you seeing?"

Bob quietly responded. "Dark, tortured, protective, straightforward, and stubborn. I can sense that he's caused several deaths recently. I can also sense that he's saved lives. I'm getting a very strong vigilante feel from him. He feels a lot like Kincaid has since he took up the bodyguard position with the Archive."

_You deep read Kincaid's aura and didn't warn me? Something else to discuss._

The stickman stopped walking, leaned over a little, and picked up the sparrow that had been sitting on the ice. It had been staring at us ever since throwing the strange spiked sword hilt at us. As the stickman turned back, he was holding the sparrow on the palm of his left hand. I noticed that his hand was missing all four fingers. Calmly, he commented. "Are you done talking about me behind my back yet?"

_Straightforward and stubborn, don't try to be evasive._ "Bob here analyzed the ritual diagram that summoned you. It didn't specify that you had to be a 'good guy', and I can't see auras. I'll be happy to keep talking with Bob about you while you listen, if you like."

With a little smile, he nodded minutely. "I can't realistically call myself a 'good' guy, that's certain." He paused briefly. "Vigilante is appropriate in a lot of ways though. I'm going to go get my sword now." The stickman held his left hand against his chest, and the sparrow hopped into one of many large holes between broken branches. I could barely make out the shape of the sparrow as it turned around in the stickman's chest cavity, watching Bob and me closely, saying nothing.

I watched as the stranger started walking deliberately in a wide arc around me, his gait seemed forced, unbalanced. He wobbled a bit as he walked, then spoke. "You called the monster a wendigo? I've heard of them, but never run into one. I'm not too thrilled to have run into this one."

_He's seriously injured, but trying to pretend he's only a little hurt. He's asking questions to distract us from how injured he is._

"I'm not too happy to be chasing it either. Plenty of other things I'd rather be doing. I'm needed though, so I'm here." I pushed the sword a few inches down into the ice, wriggled it around a little to open a hole, and then stuck the end of Bob's staff into it like a flag staff in a flag holder.

The stickman's eyebrows raised a bit as he saw me cut a hole in the ice with no effort. The bird in his chest fluttered a bit, clearly agitated.

With my left hand now free, I unzipped my jacket a little bit, pulled an old pince-nez from my shirt pocket, and put it on.

As I did so, the stranger stopped moving, staring at me intently. "Nobody has worn glasses like that in a very long time where I come from. The technology here is at roughly the same level as that of my world, if the van where the wendigo ate the woman is any indication." He paused. "Heirloom magical device? So, what do they do? Help detect lies would be my guess, or see through illusions?"

"They allow me to see more clearly. I will not say exactly what they do." _Your guess was good though. Clearly you have some knowledge of magic._

"Are you capable of manipulating magic?" I asked.

"Not directly. I used to be a practitioner, but I lost the ability when I became this." He used his right hand to point at his torso.

Bob broke in. "Boss, our friend isn't just made of sticks with a face and hair. There are bones in there. From several different people."

He was right. With the pince-nez helping to offset the effects of the lozenges and harsh light from the sword, I was quickly able to discern bones within the sticks. I couldn't tell from a distance if they belonged to different people, but Bob was probably reading auras from the bones.

The stickman started to move again, slowly, towards the broken sword, and commented. "Your familiar is right. My body is an amalgam of bone and wood, with a little flesh left over."

"I am not a familiar." Bob hissed.

After a moment, the stickman spoke again. "I apologize for offending you, Bob. I do not know this world. The magic seems very different in many ways."

_Still no sign of a lie yet._

_Big question coming up._ I knew I tensed up a little, and did so visibly, because I saw the stickman tense up some as well, in response. "You were drawn here with a diagram that was an unrestricted cry for help. Who are you helping?"

The stranger stared at me for a full five seconds, utterly motionless. "I think I understand now. You are worried that, despite appearances, due to a summoning, I might want to help the monster Evan and I just fought." He paused, and squinted his eyes at me, clearly watching my reactions. "We're hunting the monster that ate the woman, not helping it. As far as that diagram was concerned, it just drew us to the van."

Something didn't seem right, and then I remembered that Bob said wendigo were a lot like loup-garou. "Before you pick up the sword, where did all the blood here come from?"

He looked at me like I was ignorant, and spoke slowly. "The monster Evan and I were chasing. The thing from the van. You say it was a wendigo? I hurt it pretty bad."

Bob sputtered. "Wendigo can't bleed like this. They regenerate too quickly. Hit one hard enough and you might get a splatter of blood from a huge wound, but there's no way one would bleed out like this."

The stranger stared at Bob, clearly irritated. "In my world, If I proved what you said to be a falsehood, it would cause you a great deal of power loss. Is that true in this world?"

"No, but I'm rarely wrong, and I'm pretty sure I know more about this world's wendigo than you do." Bob was getting indignant.

I held my left hand up, palm up, at shoulder level. "Bob, he wasn't lying. Please don't start a fight." Bob grumbled, but stopped. I turned my head to the stickman "At the same time, Bob is rarely wrong. Can you clarify? How did you make a wendigo bleed like a man?"

"The Hyena there," he pointed at the broken sword, "Causes wounds that will not heal. Before the wendigo tore me apart, I cut it several times, and two of those cuts were heavy wounds that bled freely. The wendigo was bleeding all over the place. I'm surprised it didn't bleed out completely before it figured out that it could create bigger wounds by biting or gouging out around the Hyena's wounds. Those bigger wounds healed rapidly, completely, as you said. It left quite a few pieces of itself laying around here, if you want proof."

Bob muttered something about blood regenerating and never bleeding out, as he disconnected himself from the staff and started scanning the ground. I thought about calling him back and explaining that we were still in a standoff situation.

"Evan, please show Bob the piece of arm the wendigo left behind." I felt the wind pick up dramatically, briefly, and a substantial chunk of muscle and white fur rolled across the ice and stopped under Bob, who froze, staring at it. His skull turned towards me, and he said nothing as he returned to the staff. _I know he hates being proven wrong, and the fact that he's saying nothing means he believes he was wrong._

The stranger spoke again, the voice sounding a little less rough. "OK, Jedi and Bob, are we at a point where I can pick up my sword yet? Maybe even introduce ourselves politely?"

"Jedi?" I sighed. _Even people from different realities know Star Wars._ A second later, I realized that he had made a Hoth crack the first time he spoke around me. "That galaxy is far, far away from here too. Call me Butters. You are?"

The stickman smiled slightly. "I'm Blake, good to meet you, Butters." He leaned over and picked up the spiked sword and tucked it into a hole in the side of his torso. "Do you mind if we get off the lake ice, please? I need to find some bushes or small trees and heal up as well as I can. We also need to catch up with the Wendigo again. If that sword's as good as it looks, and if you are any good with it, between the four of us I think we can take it."

The lozenges were gone, and I was starting to get a bit nauseous. _This is not a good time._

I removed the glasses and put them back in their pocket. They were starting to give me a headache.

I would pay for it later, but I needed to do this now. I reached into my front right pants pocket and found the packet of mint strips. As I pulled one out of the package and put it on my tongue I noticed Blake and Evan both staring at me.

"Your breath really isn't all that important right now, is it?" Evan asked.

"It's not just a mint strip, it's also a minor, temporary regenerative. I use it to counter alchemical abuse on my body. I'm coming down from multiple alchemical doses."

They both just stared at me. "I'm no wizard, changeling or fae. I'm human. I didn't catch you by bouncing along behind you until I miraculously appear in front of you like that cartoon skunk."

Blake smiled a bit. "I was wondering about that. Alchemy is potent here?" He paused and grimaced. "I didn't get an opportunity to study alchemy much before I fought Ur."

Evan was staring at me, not saying anything, but it didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what he was thinking. "I don't know if these will help you two, and they only last about six hours before all the wounds and discomforts are back."

Bob spoke up. "Blake doesn't have a metabolism at all, really. I'm certain Evan doesn't need to eat, but I think he can. If that's the case, it should work for Evan, but he should get a very small dose, a sliver of a sheet."

A couple minutes later, Blake was standing in the middle of some heavy bushes. Broken pieces of wood were falling at his feet as the bushes around him twisted and molded themselves into his body, weaving their way through him like macramé. It was pretty damn creepy to watch. Bob was clearly rapt, because he didn't say anything for at least three minutes.

Taking my eyes off Blake, I held one of the mint strips out to Evan. He stared at me until I set it down, and then he shook one of his wings and a gust of wind picked the strip up and carried it to him. He snatched the strip out of the air with one claw, before staring at me with one eye, and at Blake with another.

I saw that Blake was watching carefully, and tense. He nodded, and Evan took a nibble out of the strip, and then, a couple seconds later, another nibble.

After a few seconds, he hopped from leg to leg and fluttered his wings. "I'm definitely feeling better. How long do these take to work, Butters?" Evan asked. "Oh, and how can you hear me if you aren't an Other or a practitioner? And why weren't you affected when I was trying to break your attention connections earlier?"

"Whoah, one question at a time. The healing from the strips takes a few seconds for me, and at my weight it's not much more than anti-nausea and digestive tract healing. Bob, could it be different for Evan?"

Bob said nothing for a second. "No. Ten seconds or so, at most for full effect. Faster, if anything. Small bird metabolisms are pretty intense." A couple seconds later, he continued. "You were pretty badly hurt, Evan. Either that or the strips aren't effecting you very strongly. Take another nibble every twenty seconds or so until you are healed."

_Interesting questions._ "Evan, I'm not sure exactly what you mean when you ask if I can hear you. Are you inaudible where you came from?"

Blake chuckled and, with a smile, said "No. Definitely not." Evan's head rapidly rotated around and he looked up at Blake, who smiled again. "Normal humans can't hear him where we're from though, unless they are very young, or awakened."

Blake clearly wanted to ask more, but hesitated. I nodded to him "Ask away. If it's off limits, I won't answer.

"You seem to know about the magical world. I'm surprised you haven't done whatever your version of the awakening ritual is. Why not, if you don't mind me asking? These things you are doing with alchemy would be more easily done with magic directly, especially with the demesnes that you would be able to command with an..." he cut his eyes at Bob "assistant as capable as Bob and an implement like that sword."

I shook my head. "Doesn't work like that here. You're born with it, or you don't have magic. I recognize the word demesnes, but as far as I know it has nothing to do with a magic user's strength." I looked over at Bob. "Bob, why are you being quiet? You should be interrupting and explaining things right about now."

"I know how magic works here, and what they are saying makes no sense. Not for here. But I think I have an answer to Evan's last question. Wielders of Swords of the Cross tend to be damn near invulnerable to magical energies applied directly against them, and strongly resistant to environmental magic not targeted directly at them."

Blake nodded. "I don't know what a 'Sword of the Cross' is, and I know less about magical artifacts than alchemy, but if that sword of yours isn't a magical artifact, I'd be amazed. Standing near it when it's active like it is now is like being in front of a bonfire. I can even feel its presence when the blade's not active, like a banked fire."

"You can feel its presence, even deactivated?" Bob sounded incredulous.

Staring at Bob, not quite coldly, but very intently, Blake continued "Please remember that where I'm from, lying is highly likely to cause severe problems with the spirits. I prefer to play it safe when I can, at least where my power and ability to fight is concerned. I don't know for sure if my world's rules will carry over for me here, somehow, so I'm going to follow the rules I know."

Bob said nothing for a moment before apologizing. "Sorry if I offended, Blake. I'm not even going to ask what the spirits are that would take active exception to lies. I'm getting a headache. I'm used to being the magic expert, and a lot of what you are saying makes no sense here, even though I'll trust you when you say it works there."

"Like how all the symbols in the diagram in the van weren't anything like the ones in the books back home?" Evan piped up, fluttering his wings. The mint strip gripped in his right claw was substantially nibbled, but less than a quarter was missing. He was apparently fully healed, and as I watched, he practically exploded off the snow into the air and landed on Blake's shoulder.

Bob went silent. A new language of magical symbols? I could only imagine what was going on in his head. I made a note to talk to him later.

After a second, Blake continued. "Going back to detecting your sword, Butters, I knew someone or something with substantial magical potential was coming our way before you even came onto the lake. With Evan's help I had managed to reconnect an arm before I felt you. I sent Evan out to intercept you with the ring while I continued to try to put myself back together. I figured you were either tracking us by our physical tracks or with the ring, and Evan should have been able to throw you off the trail either way, even if he had to leave the ring for you to find." He paused. "Things didn't work out quite how I expected they would."

"Can Blake try this stuff? It worked for me."

Blake looked at me, and I looked at Bob.

"Is shouldn't do any harm. He appears to have a functional tongue to allow him to speak, so he can dissolve it, but I don't know if he'll get much benefit at all. Alchemical products designed to improve human performance generally require human biology." Bob's voice sounded curious, but not excited.

Blake took the partially consumed mint strip from Evan with his left hand and placed it on his tongue, turning his head and barely opening his mouth to do so, so neither Bob nor I could see into his mouth. He stood there, immobile, clearly concentrating for about fifteen seconds before stating, "I felt nothing."

"Are you still injured?" I asked. "The bushes seem to have stopped growing into you. Looks like a lot of broken pieces were replaced."

Looking down at himself, Blake moved around, clearly stretching and testing different joints. "Yes, fairly substantially. Wood alone can't heal me fully after what the wendigo did to me." He paused a moment. "Are you ready to move?"

I was ready. "Yes, but we'll have to move at a normal human pace for a little while until I can safely take another couple alchemical doses. How much longer, Bob?"

Bob muttered to himself for a couple seconds. "Six minutes, Boss. Before we go though, I want a sample of that wendigo blood. They can hide their tracks if they choose to, but with some of that blood to create a tracking anchor I can find it anywhere."

Evan fluttered around on Blake's shoulder. "Would one of the wendigo's fingers work? Blake cut two of them off. I remember where one froze to the ice, and can go get it."

"Yes. Any part of it would work. A finger is a pretty big piece, it would make an excellent anchor for a detection spell." Bob sounded satisfied.

"Wind's pretty heavy and a finger is a pretty heavy load for a sparrow." I commented.

With a slightly offended tone Evan responded to me. "I, Butters, am an awesome sparrow. I was hurt when I was bouncing you and Bob around on the ice a while ago. A finger's no problem. Promise." Evan shot off of Blake's shoulder at a speed that made him difficult to track.

Blake smiled and shook his head. "Please remember he has the temperament of an eight-year-old, no matter how competent he might be. He had a very hard death, and a very hard afterlife for far too long. More than that is his story to tell, but I'd appreciate it if you don't ask until after we've dealt with the wendigo. I don't want him unsettled."

We all started walking towards the ice, and before we'd reached the ice again, Evan showed up, a white-furred, black-clawed finger in his claws. He landed in Bob's right eye socket, and when he came back out, he was no longer carrying the finger, but he was carrying the silver ring.

Without raising my voice, conversationally-toned, I asked, "Bob, did you drain the ring?"

Taking a cue from me, Bob didn't express alarm about the theft. "Yes. No more power in it. I'm setting up the tracking spell now." His tone changed a second later. "Wow, this is fascinating. I've never heard of someone acquiring a sample of Wendigo flesh, bone, or claw. Whatever's left after we're done, we'll want to use for alchemy, Boss." That did sound interesting, but scary at the same time. Ingesting parts of the possessed body of an inhuman serial killer did not strike me as something I wanted to do.

_We can have that discussion later._

Evan had landed on Blake's right hand. As Bob started muttering while setting up the tracking spell, the bloody ring was dropped into Blake's palm. Blake looked at me, not quite challenging me to say anything, but with no sign that he felt Evan had done anything wrong. From all the blood on the ice, Blake had clearly given the wendigo a hard time. If he wanted the ring while we dealt with the wendigo, he could have it.

Just to be sure Blake knew where I stood on the matter I carefully spoke in a level tone. "When this is all done, that ring is going back to the woman's family."

Blake nodded, and after a couple seconds of thought, spoke. "Neither Evan nor I will attempt to keep the ring after the wendigo is dealt with."

"Boss, do you have the other battery?" Bob asked, sounding worried.

"I do, Bob. Is the first one completely drained?"

"Yes. I used a substantial chunk of the power from the ring for the tracking spell. I'm pretty low again."

I dug around in my left front pocket again, before realizing that I had used that battery, so I then dig in the left back pocket. I pulled out another big convention button. "Bob, release from the staff please."

After Bob released himself from the staff, I flipped it over so the raw wood end was to the top, and quickly repeated the installation of a new endcap battery. Bob settled himself onto the new battery with a satisfied sound. The staff was now shod on both sides. I didn't have another battery.

Evan and Blake stared at me while I installed the battery endcap on the staff. After I finished, I turned my head to look at them with a smile. You don't know what Denarians are, do you?

Blake smiled a bit. "I was a denarian from the time I was ten until I turned twenty. I'm a vicenarian now."

I froze in near-panic as I heard the first sentence. When I heard the second sentence, my medical school Latin caught up with me, and I relaxed.

Blake shook his head. "Sorry I frightened you, Butters. I know no other meaning of the word 'denarian'. I'm surprised I remembered that. I'm pretty sure I hated Latin in high school."

_He's pretty sure?_ I shook my head. "You're right. That's... not quite what I meant."

_How did he know he scared me bad enough to feel that he had to apologize for it? I'm pretty sure I've got a better poker face than that._

Evan was looking back and forth, from me to Blake, clearly not understanding what had just passed between us. He hopped from leg to leg on Blake's shoulder for a second then false-whispered to Blake, clearly intending for me to hear as well. "Blake, he's Batman, but shorter."

I chuckled. "This is my light traveling kit, Evan, you should see all the stuff I carry when I _know_ I'm going to be wading in deep doodoo." There were quite a few things that I was really missing right then. _The body armor, for instance._

We walked out onto the ice, following the tracks that the Wendigo had left after it had dismantled Blake. The storm was getting worse. I checked my phone for signal. None.

Bob had been quiet for a bit, but I had been expecting something like what he said next for a while. "Evan, come over here and talk to me about those symbols from your world that you mentioned, if you don't mind."

Evan hopped around on Blake's shoulder. "What, for free? No way! You said you're a magical expert here, right? I'll teach you those symbols from my world if you can teach me a way to become a fire sparrow. Not all the time though, Blake's made of wood."

Blake quickly looked at Bob with something resembling fear. "No real fire, Bob. Please. He can look like fire all he wants, but no real fire."

Evan hopped around on Blake's shoulder, agitated. "I want real fire, Blake, I can't burn monsters with fake fire." He spun and faced Bob. "Real fire!"

Bob chuckled. "Becoming a true fire-form would burn you up when you changed back to a regular sparrow, Evan. The residual heat would cook your feathers off. You'd end up looking like a three-ounce Thanksgiving turkey. It might not kill you, but it might be one of the most painful things you ever experience."

The little sparrow went stock still, staring at Bob.

Blake reached up and rubbed Evan's head gently with a gnarled wooden fingertip, staring hard at Bob. "He doesn't know, Evan. We got even, remember, and helped the others too?"

Evan shook himself and looked at Blake. "Yeah. We did. Still hurts to think about it." He looked back at Bob. "Fine, no real fire." Evan fluttered off Blake's shoulder and into Bob's right eye socket, and I heard the two of them start talking, but in tones so low I couldn't understand.

_Why does it make me so nervous that I can't hear what they are saying?_

Blake was looking at Bob's skull, and from his expression, he was probably having very similar thoughts.

Bob piped up, sounding distracted. "Two minutes till you can dose again, Boss. Just in case I get distracted."

_Just in case you get distracted? By an entirely new magical language? That nobody else on this Earth knows, including the Archive?_ I couldn't help but chuckle.

Bob's voice got a bit louder. "What do you mean you only know the symbols, not what they mean?"

I smiled and nearly laughed out loud.

Evan's voice got louder too. "I'm eight. They weren't teaching me. I learned it all from watching when they didn't know I was. I'm _really_ good at hiding and watching."

I looked at Blake. "Are we going to regret this?"

Blake looked back at me. "Probably, but as long as there's no real fire, I think we'll survive."

I looked at Blake. He seemed to be moving a bit easier than he had been a couple minutes ago. "Will you heal over time, or should we find another way to heal you the rest of the way? You said the branches didn't finish the job."

Blake looked at me for a second, and then shrugged. "You've already helped me twice. I gain strength when humans nearby fear me. You gave me a fair bit of strength on the ice when I first talked to you, and then again a couple minutes ago by accident with the denarian thing. It's been a great help. I'm not a hundred percent. Nowhere near that, really, but I'm not in terrible shape."

I looked at him, and I could see that several visible bones under the branches were damaged. The arrangements of branches was pretty amazing, almost like they were muscles. They even flexed like muscles over the bones. After I realized that, I saw how several of the broken bones would be serious problems if he needed to move quickly. "Are you really in good enough shape to fight the wendigo again?"

Blake hesitated as he looked at me. "I can fight it again. Results not guaranteed."

I looked up at him. "What do we need to get you so that you can heal your bones? I'd really prefer to have you in the best possible shape when we catch up to the wendigo."

Blake looked at me for at least three seconds this time before responding. He tensed up a little, clearly not comfortable with telling me what he was about to say. "I can't heal my current bones. I need new bones. I need a human corpse or fresh skeleton in good condition."


	6. Chapter 6

1st Draft 01/04 1945

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><p>Chapter 6: Uneasy Alliance<p>

Butters and Blake learn a little more about each other. It doesn't make things easier.

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><p>"I see." With another look at me, Butters shook his head, grimacing. "So you are some sort of combination of chlorofiend and bone golem. At least in terms of your physical needs."<p>

I carefully avoided giving any appearance of concern. I didn't know exactly what that sword of his was, but I could feel its power. A sentient skull familiar was simply over the top in weirdness, completely outside my admittedly brief experience with magic, but he, Butters, seemed human. I didn't need to be able to read his thoughts to understand at least some of what had to be going through his head.

After a few seconds, Butters stopped looking at me as intently. It seemed like a good time to add a little more explanation. "Evan and I agreed to hunt monsters. Humans are sometimes monsters. I imagine that's the same in this world that it is in mine."

He blew out a breath of air forcefully through his lips and nodded abruptly, clearly unhappy. "It is. Some of the worst monsters in this world are humans." After a pause, he continued. "I don't see any fresh bodies or skeletons in our near future. None that I could allow you to use in that way. Desecrating fresh graves is not going to happen." He looked at me, clearly expecting agreement.

I nodded. "I will defer to you in this matter. It's your world. If we can't get a source for new human bones for me, I'll make do with what I have." It was unsurprising that he would feel that way. At the same time, I wasn't entirely certain how long a body could be buried before its bones would be unable to integrate with me. All of a single day's experience in this new body hadn't given me much time to experiment. I put that thought aside. I wouldn't consider grave robbing for now. I'd have to bring up the idea carefully with Evan, eventually.

We continued, walking along the wendigo's tracks, both of us drifting slightly farther away from the other as we walked, neither allowing the other to get too far ahead or behind.

"How much longer before you can use your alchemy again, Butters?" I asked into the silence.

He pulled out his smartphone and looked at it. "Still no signal. Another few seconds on the timer." He seemed frustrated. "I really need to reach out to the area Paranet, warn them, and tell them to get Carl's friends and family to protected areas." He looked at me. "The wendigo is wired to go after social connections. It will seek the strongest first, drawing targets from the host's memories. It's going to seek out Carl's family and friends, and then branch out after acquaintances and work colleagues, killing and consuming them until it's sated."

I couldn't help but stare. _Evan certainly was right that this thing is a monster_. "That could work in our favor if the wendigo is inflexible in its targets. It might have to travel thousands of miles to take out family members, and then travel thousands of miles back to find Carl's friends. I doubt it's going to take a plane."

"That will only make it hunt longer, kill more people." Butters paused. "Bob, does Carl have any family members that are part of the Paranet?"

The muttering between Bob and Evan paused, and Bob spoke to Butters. "Boss, there's an Ellie with Carl's last name, twenty-three years older than him. Of course, I don't have an address on her, but she's listed in the Toronto area. Minor practitioner. She's an accurate Tarot reader and capable of acting as a medium with a full day's notice to prepare. That's all I've got on her."

Picking up on Bob's comment about the address, I asked "Of course? You have some sort of organization of practitioners, but don't have addresses or phone numbers for them?" That didn't quite make sense to me.

Butters pulled a bag of lozenges from the inner pocket of his coat. "Operational security. The Paranet is loosely associated with the White Council. In the last decade or so, the White Council was at war with the Red Court of vampires. As part of that conflict, several organizations started hunting Paranet members, especially those with useful skills. We attempted to organize them like asymmetrical warfare resistance cells. In fact, before the Red Court and White Council war, there really was no Paranet."

With a loud crinkling noise, he opened a blue-wrapped and a red-wrapped lozenge, and popped them both into his mouth. "Very few people even have lists as complete as what Bob has, and even Bob doesn't keep addresses on the members. Most Paranet members only know ten or so other members, and they have to reach out to Paranet leadership to get permission to actively seek out others outside their cell. The wardens use them as information sources and consultants in their specialties, and in return the wardens protect them. A symbiotic relationship." Butters stomped his feet to check the fit of his boots, and then started to jog along the wendigo's trail. I matched his pace.

"Are you a warden then?" I asked. The concept of multiple large groups of organized practitioners working together was intriguing. Back in my world, everything seemed so tightly bound to families, or feudal.

Butters checked the straps of his backpack, as he jogged, moving with exaggerated care. "No, Wardens are magically active, typically quite strong in magic. The White Council has a long history of working with the Knights of the Cross, and most Paranet members maintain a working relationship with at least some of the various religious groups that support us. Since there are only three Knights at most in the world, typically Paranet members know who we are." He paused. "Quite a few of them will not know who I am though, as I've only been a Knight for a few months. The Sword of Faith will potentially also be confusing to them, because it's no longer what it once was."

He started running faster, and I matched his pace. He didn't seem to be straining, so I increased my pace some more, and he kept up. _I don't want this to be some sort of contest._ "I don't have a metabolism. You set the pace. If I can't keep up with you, I'll speak out."

Butters nodded and stepped up the pace again, kept that pace until I caught up, and then went faster still. I wasn't really straining yet, but we were running at least thirty or so miles per hour. My bones were in no shape to move faster. I could hear the bones striking one another where they were broken, pulling apart and coming together again rapidly as I ran.

"This is about as fast as my bones will let me move reliably right now." I advised.

He nodded. "OK." Butters' breathing had increased in frequency, but his breath was not fogging like a human's should in cold weather. I could see heat distortion waves in his breath directly in front of his nose and mouth for several inches before the air started to fog like normal human breath in frigid weather. I looked at his head, and saw no evidence of heat waves. Whatever the alchemy was that was powering him right now, it clearly was generating a lot of heat, and he was losing it mostly if not entirely through his lungs.

_Fascinating, but not useful._

We simply ran in silence, one of us on one side of the wendigo's trail, the other on the other side, occasionally I caught him looking at me, and I'm sure that from time to time, he caught me looking at him.

"I saw what your sword did to the ice." I started to comment.

He sighed. "It's probably not going to be that easy. Inanimate objects don't resist the sword. I can carve a main battle tank like a turkey, it's literally that easy. Sanya and I went somewhere in Russia and tested it on old derelict tanks. People are a completely different story. The wendigo's current body is human. Carl has been possessed. I'm not sure what the sword will do, but I will not kill a human with the sword, intentionally."

_This might be a problem. I'm not dying for Butters' morality._ "We might not be able to stop it without killing it."

"Carl please, not "it." He glanced over at me as we ran.

I did not nod, but I didn't argue either. _I'm not humanizing it. Sob story or not, the wendigo is going to kill and eat a lot of people if we don't put it down._

Butters looked at me and frowned. "I've found that there's always a way. Sometimes it's not obvious. If I'm dense, and don't see it immediately, things tend to happen and steer me towards realizing a solution." He flipped the hilt of the sword in the air and grabbed it again as it fell. "I'm not sure if it's the sword, or if it's something behind the sword, but if you are a rational person, you would have difficulty believing the incredibly unlikely things that happen around Knights to allow us to be where we're needed, with the tools we need to get the job done."

"So you won't kill anything?" _I need to know how far you'll go, what you'll do in a fight._

"Didn't say that." Butters grimaced and looked straight forward. "I just came back from the UK, and while I was there, I ended up taking out a small den of Black Court vampires. The sword worked just fine on the Black Court members. Killing them isn't really killing though, it's ending something that's already dead, and kept animated by extremely dark magic. The Renfields were a different story. They were still alive, and when I tried to cut them to incapacitate them, the sword wouldn't cut." He paused. "To be clear, it did shock them like a cattle prod, so it wasn't useless against them. I don't really know if that's because I didn't really want to kill them, or because the sword was protecting them from permanent injury."

_He doesn't even know what his weapon will do to an enemy? That's about the strangest thing I've ever heard._ I nodded. "So, without killing it, how are we going to stop it? I can tell you from personal experience that it's no lightweight. I watched it interact with the Hyena after it took me out, trying to learn about it. It knows about the Hyena now, and will likely fight smarter the next time I encounter it. Even with you fighting beside me, I'm injured still. It's absurdly strong and will be able to take either of us out of a fight with a single good blow." _I also haven't actually seen you fight, no matter how potentially powerful that sword seems to be._

Butters nodded. "I understand where you're coming from. Neither of us have seen the other fight. If we can incapacitate it, and get it into a circle, Bob can design a ritual to force the wendigo to leave Carl's body, I think. If not, we'll call in some heavier guns. It's a possession. I have not required the assistance of an exorcist yet, but I've been told that there are quite a few practitioner priests and rabbis who are quite adept at dealing with possession." Butters grinned.

_I suppose that makes some sense. Still a whole lot of questions, but I've gone into many fights knowing less._

Through the heavy snow, I was able to see blue and red strobe lights ahead. Butters wiped his eyes with the back of the gloved hand holding his sword before looking forward again and muttering something about the lights really being there. _Hallucinations? He did mention alchemy having drawbacks. I hope he can still fight when the time comes._

"Looks like it crossed the road here. We'll need to pick up the tracks on the other side." Butters commented.

I nodded, but didn't say anything to him in response because I didn't have anything to add, yet. Evan would be ideal for this though. "Evan, can you take a quick look around and see if you can spot where the wendigo left the road?"

"On it, Blake." Evan popped out of Bob's left eye socket and shot up into the air as Butters and I moved closer to the road.

As we approached the road, Butters seemed a little agitated. "There are two ambulances. I need to make sure I'm not needed here." He looked at me. "Give me a couple minutes."

"What, are you a doctor?" I asked.

"Yes. Well, a coroner. I have medical training that's more advanced than any EMT should have, and I have alchemy as well, if the need's dire enough." After a moment of thought, he looked out over the two small cargo trucks, two ambulances, and half-dozen police cars, and then continued, looking at the skull. "Bob, there are lots of officers there. Please veil me to look like I belong. I'll flash a light around, like I'm looking for evidence of something on the road. I can see three officers doing the same thing right now. We should be able to fit in, and move around the vehicles with a minimal veil of misdirection." He put his sword hilt in his right coat pocket and pulled up the right bottom of the coat a bit, exposing a belt with several pouches. He then removed a very small flashlight from one of the longer pouches at his hip.

"Veil's ready, Boss." Bob muttered.

Butters moved out onto the road, skull staff in one hand, shining the flashlight around under vehicles with the other. He seemed very comfortable out there with the police and EMT's, looking like he was searching for something, mixing and talking quietly with the officers, even going as far as talking with people inside the ambulances. _Looks like something Sandra would do, making himself belong. Being a coroner probably makes it a lot easier, if he did field work professionally and knows how officers and EMT's interact with one another from experience._

I heard a man's voice speaking loudly next to the two small panel trucks with refrigeration units that had apparently been in a wreck. "Like I said, officer, I got no clue what Vinnie hit. All I saw was somethin' white and hairy running away. It looked like it was on two legs but I really wasn't paying attention. I was tryin' to keep from hitting Vinnie's truck more than tryin' to see what he hit. Whatever it was stopped his truck like he hit a wall. I was five seconds back from him and still barely stopped in time."

I moved carefully a little to my right, putting a thicker barrier of roadside bushes between myself and the speakers. Carefully and slowly, I moved myself so that I could watch them through the branches, while at the same time not watching them too intently, and watching for signs that they might feel me watching them.

Looking through the branches, I watched as the officer responded. "Mr. Caliveri, I understand, but we would really like you to come to the station and at least try to help describe whatever it was that your partner hit. The road has a pair of trenches six inches deep and ten feet long in it, the front of his truck is folded into itself like he hit a telephone pole. There isn't any blood from an animal or any sign of any obstruction along the roadway that could have caused this much damage. It doesn't make sense."

The civilian sounded upset. "I can't do it. Vinnie's only got a few broke bones and the ambulance guys say he'll be fine. The second ambulance will get tha donor liver to the patient, but there's still a frozen cadaver in Vinnie's van. I can't leave it."

_Really?_

Mr. Caliveri seemed to talk loudly with his mouth and widely with his hands. The officer backed a step away from him, with a patient look, giving him space.

The driver continued after a second collecting his thoughts. "My truck is fine, officer, but it's loaded with this month's paperwork. Since the weather is cold enough to keep the cadaver frozen, I'm not allowed to swap some of the paperwork from my truck with the cadaver in Vinnie's and finish the delivery that way." He paused, and looked at the officer. "That's not just me sayin' so. I called tha home office to see if they would let me do that wid help from you officers. They said no. The liver was another story, didn't even have to ask permission. I got standing orders that says if I'm delayed I can request an ambulance for live organ transplant deliveries."

The driver slapped his hands together and rubbed them against each other a bit, shivering. "I gots to wait here with Vinnie's truck until the tow gets here, and then lead tha tow truck that hauls it to tha Toronto storage facility. Unless I'm under arrest?"

Both ambulances pulled away, with two police cruisers in escort, one ahead of the first ambulance, the other behind the second. All four vehicles had their lights flashing, but sirens turned off. Both men watched silently as the four vehicles drove off.

The officer turned back to the driver. "No, Mr. Caliveri, you're not under arrest. When you've delivered your cargo to Toronto, can you please go to a local police station and ask them if they can spare a forensic artist to help draw what you saw?"

"Sure officer, I'll do that for ya." He paused. "If you want tha phone number of my boss to call an' talk to him, I can give it to you. If you can change his mind, an' he tells me it's OK, I'll do what ya ask. Even tha truck-mounted phones were having problems in this weather though. I'll let you use the one in my truck if you want, if your cruiser's phone doesn't work." The driver raised his right arm with the thumb extended towards the cab of his little cargo truck, looking almost like a hitchhiker. "If it's OK, officer, I want to hop back into my truck and warm up. The missus won't be happy with me if I get pneumonia, 'specially if the kids catch it from me after. You come talk to me if ya need my truck phone."

The officer nodded, clearly not happy, but he didn't ask for the phone number the driver had offered. He didn't seem angry about the lack of cooperation either. The two exchanged a few more words as the driver got into his truck. After the door of the truck closed, the officer went back to one of the police cars.

I looked at the side of the little cargo truck as the driver hopped in, sat down, pulled off his gloves, adjusted the air vents, and clearly said a prayer before reaching over and grabbing a thermos. On the side of both trucks, in bold lettering was _**'Caliveri Family Medical Delivery'**_

The chances of this happening were surreal. _Butters wasn't kidding when he said things tend to happen around him._

Evan landed on my shoulder and started talking into my ear. "I found where the wendigo left the road."

I nodded. "Thanks Evan, we should be able to use that soon." _We need to consult with Butters before acting on the cadaver._ "For now, I want you to think about how you would distract these officers attention away from the back of the damaged truck there, so I can get the cadaver out of it."

"There's a body in the truck? They ship bodies around in delivery trucks? I thought they used ambulances and hearses for that." Evan sounded stunned.

_Better to give him an answer rather than have him be distracted trying to figure it out himself. _"People can choose to donate their bodies to research or education in our world, Evan. I bet the same is true here. When people do that, their bodies are shipped around differently."

Evan fluffed his feathers. "Makes sense, I guess. Let me know when you want to get the body. I'll keep them distracted. It'll be easy. I'm sure none of them are practitioners. Whatever Bob is doing is doing funny things to their connections."

I reached up and tapped his head with my left index finger. "We're part of a team for now, and it's their world. We wait for Butters and talk to him first. If we started trying to take the body now, he might fight us. Those glasses he used on us told him we were honest, but that doesn't mean he likes us." _He seems to see me as predator, and he's not wrong. He clearly sees himself as a shepherd. He'll work with us as long as we have common goals. After that, well, we'll see._

I watched as Butters walked up to the truck where Mr. Caliveri was drinking something that was steaming as he clearly tried to get warm, like he had told the officer he was going to do. Butters knocked on the driver side window. The driver looked at him, and nodded before whirling his finger in the air and pointed at the passenger side door. After Butters started walking around the front of the truck, the driver set down the cup, leaned over, lifted the mechanical locking knob on the passenger side door, and then picked up his steaming cup again.

Butters let himself into truck. The two of them talked briefly, and then the driver handed over a handset with a wire leading to the console of the truck. He poked his hand at the place where the handset's wire came out of the console, probably typing in a code or entering commands. I saw Butters make several phone calls. The driver didn't react at all to anything Butters said, simply staring ahead, hot, steaming drink in hand.

Watching someone interact with others who were having their perceptions modified was peculiar, and I couldn't even see the connections like Evan could. Butters was apparently talking to Bob, and the driver wasn't paying any attention to them. After a couple sentences, talking while facing the skull, Butters made one more phone call. He then handed the phone back to the driver, got out of the truck, and walked out to us.

Butters stopped a few feet from Evan and me. "Well, Blake, I'm pretty sure I've been given a bit of a sign here that you need to be in top shape for when we catch up with the Wendigo. I saw you watching the driver and the officer talking. I'm guessing it's no surprise to you that there's a medical cadaver in the truck that hit the wendigo?"

"I was going to ask you about that." I responded, carefully.

"Thank you, but it seems pretty obvious that this was arranged." He turned slightly and looked at the wrecked truck. "I won't say that I'm entirely comfortable with what I'm about to let you do, but it's a research cadaver." He seemed lost in thought, with a troubled expression.

After a second, I asked, "Did your phone calls go through?"

"Yes. I was able to contact Karrin. She will send out an alarm to the Toronto Paranet, warning them to gather, prepare defenses, and guard Carl's non-gifted family. She hasn't seen Harry for a while, and no phone can survive his presence for more than a few seconds. I tried to call Thomas and Sanya. No luck there either. I even reached out to see if I could get some help with Marcone. I was able to reach him. He's got a thing about kids getting hurt, but his organization is weak in Toronto. He was able to arrange for a few taxis for Paranet members, but that was about it. I'll owe him a minor favor that does not involve criminal activity in exchange. I feel dirty even talking to the man, but something as simple as taxis can make a big difference moving people to safer places."

I thought about it for a second. Not good, but better than where we were. "So we're still on our own, but the Paranet members won't get caught completely flat-footed by the wendigo."

"That's about it." He turned his head slightly, looking at the skull on the staff. "Bob, how's power holding up?"

The disembodied voice of the skull spoke. "Power's fine for now, Boss. The next part will be harder, and the faster we do it the better. Making people see you as a law enforcer at a crime scene isn't hard, you know how to act from experience. Keeping the other driver and the officers from realizing that they are seeing you steal a dead body, that's going to take more power."

_Since Butters is going to allow me to harvest bones from the body, we need to help prevent Bob from using too much power. He seems to have very sharply defined power limits. _"Evan, can you distract the officers for a while so that Bob won't have to use as much power to keep them from seeing what we're doing?"

"Yes. Will do. Bob, what do you want me to do? Just keep them from looking at the wrecked truck? I can do that pretty easy, I'll make them all pay attention to the line of cars trying to get around the wreck, and make the drivers of the cars pay attention to the road, not the wreck."

Bob responded quickly. "Yes, Evan, thank you. That would be perfect. It will barely cost me any power to keep them from noticing us, if you can direct their attention towards something else."

"OK." Evan flitted off my shoulder and landed on the back of the cargo truck, and started looking around. After a couple seconds, he started to flutter his wings and hop around a little bit.

Butters looked at Bob's skull. "Say when you're ready, Bob."

"Ready now. Evan's making this trivial. I really need to learn how he's doing that. He keeps talking about connections like he can actually see interactions in some way between people, and interfere with them."

"That's a pretty good description of what Evan is doing right now." I commented, but didn't give details. We needed to act quickly.

"OK, let's move. Blake, approach the truck from the side. We won't be going to the back. That would make it a lot harder for Evan and Bob, I think.

With a hop of about twenty feet, Butters jumped from next to the bushes to the side of the cargo compartment of the wreck. I hadn't noticed before, but there was a door there, as well as the more typical cargo door at the back of the cargo compartment. He wavered a little on his feet, wiped his eyes with the back of his right hand, and then waved for me to join him as he pulled the sword hilt from his right coat pocket.

_OK, that was pretty impressive. A twenty foot standing leap, and he didn't fall on his ass, even though he landed on an icy road._ Even though we had been running together and his endurance had been clearly more than human, it was clear that he was holding back quite a bit to match the injured me.

I didn't try to match his jump. With broken bones, a jump like that would be problematic for me. I walked quickly from the bushes along the road, crossing to where he was as his sword flared to life, and he carefully cut the lock off the door. The sword cut the heavy duty padlock as easily as I had seen it cut into the ice on the lake.

_I wonder if the God in our universe watched Star Wars?_

Butters dismissed the blade, and pointed at the door. He did not put the hilt back in his pocket though. With one hand holding Bob's staff and the other holding the de-activated sword, it was clearly my job to open the door and get the cadaver.

Butters was watching me closely as I opened the door.

I turned to him, and said "Problem?"

"No problem, I just wasn't sure if you would be able to touch the door. Iron." Butters shrugged. "It would have made things more complicated."

"Iron doesn't bother me." I turned back to the opened door and pulled myself into the cargo section of the truck. There was a wooden crate, sealed, sitting on a pallet. It was held in place by a many-layers-thick wrapping of clear pinkish plastic. It was the only container in the cargo section, and marked with a large red and yellow sticker saying "medical cadaver" so there was no doubt what it was.

I quickly ripped off the plastic holding the crate on the pallet, and dragged the crate to the side door. It wasn't light, but it wasn't terribly heavy either, I jumped down and carefully pulled the crate out of the cargo section of the truck onto my left shoulder.

I looked over at Butters, who was watching closely, clearly not happy. With a grimace, he nodded. I balanced the crate over my left shoulder with my left arm as I used my right arm to close the door and latch it. I walked quickly into the woods. I could feel my damaged bones protesting the extra weight. The crate and cadaver had to weigh three hundred pounds or more. I guessed I weighed in at around fifty.

Butters and I walked side by side away from the road, separated by several feet. Evan fluttered up to me and landed on my head and started rearranging my hair a little before I felt him settling in. _Bird's nest hair, for real_, I thought to myself with a smile.

Butters didn't look at me as he spoke. "How long will this take you? Are there rituals you need to do, or anything we can do to speed it up?" He paused and sighed. "We want you in good condition, but I only have a limited amount of alchemy, and every time I delay paying the price for using it, the worse recovery will be. In a bit less than six hours, I'm going to be hurting. Pushing off paying for the abuse is a matter of diminishing returns. The more alchemy I use now, the more I'll hurt later. I'll eventually have to pay the price for the abuse I'm putting my body through."

I looked over at him. "Why do I get the feeling that you're pushing yourself harder than you need to? You've got some sort of power looking over your shoulder that gives you things like this." I tapped the crate on my left shoulder. "I understand pushing yourself in a fight, but you're pushing yourself really hard before the fight."

Butters looked over at me, sharply, glaring. "Don't go there. I'm short. I'm not trying to overcompensate."

_Really? Do tell. I'm sure you're about to tell me all about it._

Butters was quiet for a moment. "Sorry, I shouldn't have snapped at you." He paused a moment, clearly organizing his thoughts. "Please understand that even though I am a coroner by profession, I'm also a doctor, and I take that seriously. Add to that, the fact that I'm being allowed to wield a holy artifact whose purpose is protecting the innocent and redeeming the fallen. Yes, I'm also small physically. I grew up in a Western culture where probably half the adult male population is a foot taller than me and twice my weight. My size is not the root of any significant mental issues."

I said nothing, staying silent, letting him talk.

He turned to me. "I've always been somewhat driven to do the right thing. I've always wanted to help people. That's why I became a doctor. That's why I put up with Harry even when he scared me. Now I have this too." He waved the sword hilt in front of him. "Add to that a spirit of intellect, Bob here, who just happens to be a magical expert with strong knowledge of alchemy and magical devices." He blew out a heavy breath. "God helps those who help themselves. It might not actually be in the scriptures, but I've never doubted it to be true. I'm sure He also helps those who can't help themselves, if they are receptive to Him, but I _can_ help myself."

I looked at Butters as he looked at me, and nodded. "I see. You're a driven man. Been there myself, when I was human." _It got me nearly killed by Ur. _"Still am, really, I suppose, but I'm not operating within the limits of human biology. You are, even if you can cheat a bit." I pulled out the Hyena, slowly, so I didn't threaten Butters with rapid movement and a held weapon.

Butters' eyes snapped to the blade and he took a half step away from me. "How did you wield that thing when you were human? Those spikes would do terrible things to a human trying to grip it with any sort of strength, and you say the wounds it creates won't heal?"

I raised the Hyena up to chest level, and twisted it back and forth, slowly, looking at it and remembering. "This used to be an Other, a magical being like me."

"The Hyena was nothing like you, Blake!" Evan interrupted, sounding horrified.

I smiled. "Sorry Evan. In some ways you are right. In other ways I am right. We certainly don't think or act like the Hyena, but you and me and the Hyena, we're all Others. Or rather you and I are Others, and the Hyena used to be."

Evan grumbled a bit. "Well, OK, I guess."

I put the Hyena back in my torso, and reached up to carefully, briefly scratch Evan on the head and between his wings. "Going back to what I was saying, Butters, the Hyena was an Other that could shape itself into a weapon if it chose to do so. Others with the ability to take a weapon form tend to have effects associated with their weapon-selves that match an important natural ability of their normal body. The Hyena died fighting at my command, and as it died, it reverted to a broken version of its weapon-self. The Hyena's ability to create wounds that would not heal was maintained in the weapon-self corpse."

I could feel Evan shaking and I knew he wasn't cold. "Enough about the past for now. Are we far enough from the road for me to get started, Butters?"

He turned to look back towards the road, blinked his eyes, and rubbed them with the back of one fist. The blue strobes of the police cars were barely visible through the heavy snow. "Yes, but be quick, please. I doubt they will check the lock, but it's possible they might. I'm also losing time on my lozenges."

I quickly pried open the crate and removed the male corpse inside. Setting it on the ground next to the crate, I sliced into frozen flesh with the Hyena to remove most of the arm and leg bones, as well as a several ribs, various shoulder bones, and the bones of his left hand. Each bone removed was immediately replaced. Bones pressed against my limbs were gripped by wooden tendrils, and my wooden muscles relaxed, disconnected from one another as needed, and reconnected surrounding new bone as old bones away. The tendrils cleaned away the little bits of excess flesh remaining on the bones, absorbing them.

For the first two minutes that I was repairing myself with the cadaver's bones, Butters was standing twenty feet away, staring at me, muttering back and forth with Bob. He was clearly unhappy with what I was doing. I saw him draw out the pince-nez from his shirt pocket again and watch me for a few moments. After watching me replace a bone, he silently returned them to the pocket again and just watched, saying nothing, until I was done.

A few minutes after beginning, I picked up the remains of the cadaver and placed it back in its crate. A moment later, with a glance at Butters, I rapidly collected my pile of old, broken bones and placed them in the crate as well. As I finished cleaning up, I placed the lid back on the crate and smacked it a few times to force it back into place with the pulled-out nails it so it wouldn't be easily accessible by wildlife. A bear could still get in, but I didn't know how common bears were here, in this world, and it was winter anyway.

Butters nodded to me, face unreadable. He pulled a black magic marker out of his pocket and spoke for the first time in several minutes. "A diagram of finding, Bob, so that searchers will find it rapidly when they realize it's gone." Butters never stopped looking at me, but released the marker into the air as Bob apparently tugged it out of his grasp.

Bob rapidly created a diagram and empowered it. Seconds later, he commented. "Done, Boss."

The breath Butters probably hadn't realized he was holding blew out loudly, and then he spoke. "I'm going to have to explain this one rather carefully, I think, to the church and probably a report to the White Council too. Forensic magic, if brought to bear on this, will lead to Bob and me. Don't make me regret it."

_He's clearly a religious man, and a doctor. He can't possibly be happy about what I just did. Tough._ "You agreed to let me do this. The cadaver being here was almost certainly arranged by whatever power acts as your concierge, arranging for you to be where you need to be with what you need to get the job done. From what little you've said about it, if there wasn't at least some approval of me, you would have seen something to indicate that I was a target for you, right?"

The little man scowled and looked up at me, without the slightest feeling of fear coming from him. "That doesn't mean I have to like it. No offense, but your aura is pretty damn dark, according to Bob." He had that sword of his out, but the blade was not lit.

I carefully considered my words. "I recognize that what I just did to that corpse is counter to your religion and your profession. It's got to feel like desecration to you."

He nodded curtly, stating flatly. "Very much so."

After a second, I continued, carefully avoiding fast movements and slowly pointed to the resealed crate. "That man apparently gave his body to make this world a better place. Some choose to do the same in my world, donating their bodies to science or medicine. If he understood what we were hunting, I'm pretty sure he wouldn't mind me using his bones." I looked at Butters, turning away from him slightly to reduce the intimidation factor a little. I wasn't trying to stare him down, but I wasn't looking away either.

Butters nodded, reluctantly, and his shoulders relaxed, slightly. "If you weren't clearly being supported by whatever power it is that helps guide me, I'm not sure that would be enough. But you are." His mouth quirked slightly. "Concierge. Sanya will like that, I think, if I'm not struck by lightning while I tell him."

Turning a little away from Butters a little more, but not allowing him out of my peripheral vision, I spoke quietly but slowly and evenly. "Evan, please lead us to where the wendigo left the roadway."

Evan flew off the top of my head, saying "Follow me!"

Carefully keeping our distance from one another, Butters and I followed.


	7. Chapter 7

1st Draft 01/06 1500

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><p>Chapter 7: Tiger by the Tail<p>

Blake and Butters catch up to the wendigo.

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><p><em>I've worked with some pretty creepy magical beings in just the last few months, but this one tops the list.<em>

If I hadn't thought I was meant to work with him, by that point I'd have found myself fighting Blake for some reason. The biggest thing holding me back was that a few conversations with Michael, Sanya, and a couple of the angelic protectors around Michael's family had made it very clear that pretty much everything around me was closely watched, especially when I was on 'official business.'

That's not to say that all harm was prevented. Many dead knights through history made that clear. Michael himself was a clear, living attestation to the mortality of knights, a rare knight who retired outside of a casket. He had suffered terrible wounds that crippled him, but he was still mobile and alive. I shook my head and returned to on-target thoughts. Blake wouldn't hinder my mission. He was likely expected, or even intended, to be my ally since he had actually been provided with... sustenance.

I shook my head. "Bob, what direction and distance to the wendigo?"

From his position, connected to the top of the staff I had cut for him, Bob responded after a few seconds. "Straight ahead along the tracks, about five miles ahead of us. We're closing in, and should catch up in about half an hour, if we all keep the current pace."

_And my current lozenges will only last another fifteen to twenty minutes. Time to push the pace._

I looked over at Blake, who was ghosting over the falling snow with a grace close to what I'd seen in Fae fighters. "I'd like to catch up with a couple minutes to spare on my current alchemical charge. Can you go faster?"

Blake turned his too-human looking face to me. "You set the pace, Butters. I'll let you know if I can't keep up." He thought for a moment. "Your breathing and speech indicates you're pushing pretty hard right now though. There might be another way. Do you have rope? Ten feet or more should be enough."

I couldn't imagine how rope would be useful for running faster, but I had twenty feet of climbing rope sewn into a long compartment at the bottom of my coat's hem. "I have rope, but it'll take a few seconds to get to. Explain."

He looked away, watching in front of himself, gracefully moving around bushes and trees. "I'll pull you. Simple enough, like skijoring."

Skijoring. I'd heard of that before, and mental images of people being hauled by ropes behind horses popped into my head. "Sounds like a plan. How much faster do you think you can go, pulling me behind you?"

"I'm not sure. I've never really tried to run as fast as I could, not uninjured, not without carrying Green Eyes." I could hear pain in his voice.

Evan popped his head out of Bob's skull, looked at Blake for a couple seconds and then back at me, but said nothing. After a few moments, he ducked back into Bob's skull, and I heard them start muttering to one another again.

"Who is..." I tried to ask.

A friend of mine. "Please don't ask more. It's not a good time, Butters."

_This 'Green Eyes' is more than a friend, I think._

"I'm willing to try it, but I don't want to tire you out either. You've said you have no metabolism, but do you have some sort of limit to your endurance?"

"I can act with a great deal of physical energy for a very long time before I get tired. Healing tires me quickly though." He turned his head a little to look towards me. "Frightening you earlier gave me the energy to heal myself rapidly. Taking on new bones and becoming more whole made me more efficient. Running is easy. I won't let myself get too tired to fight well."

The strength from the lozenges made it easy to rip a corner of the hem of the coat and pull out the rope stored there. While running, I quickly tied a honda knot, and then made a lariat loop. I ran a bit closer to Blake, drifting a little behind him.

_Michael insisted I learn this knot. I've used it a dozen times in six months. Definitely time well-spent._

He held his right hand out towards me when I got within a few feet, and I tossed the lariat loop at him. His hand snapped out, grabbing the rope out of the air with a movement I could barely follow. He held the knot in front of his face for a few seconds before nodding and widening the loop, snaking it over his head and around his waist as he ran, and then pulling it tight, like a belt. "I never learned to tie one of these. Never had a need to."

Without saying anything else, Blake slowly started to run faster. I moved so I was directly behind him and grabbed the rope with my right hand, twisting my arm around the rope three times. I then made sure of my grip on Bob, and concentrated on where to put my feet. The snow was almost five inches thick now, with a crust about three inches down where tonight's snow had started collecting.

_He was holding a lot back. _I thought, asBlake started getting faster and faster. I had to put a lot of my concentration into where I put my feet, which meant I had less to spare for branches that Blake almost blurred around. Part of that blurring was the hallucinatory effect of the alchemy, I was pretty sure. Wiping my eyes and other mental tricks I'd learned didn't make him blur less though.

"Blake, I can't go any faster, too many obstructions, I'm going to knock myself out on a branch or break a leg on a fallen tree or stump." I called out.

"Evan, see if you can help Butters avoid obstacles." Blake called out.

Evan shot out of Bob's skull and landed on Blake's shoulder. "I'll try. He's really hard to do anything to though, Blake."

"Try to help me find a better path for him to follow, or move things out of his way, if that works better." Blake said, sounding a little impatient.

Evan hopped into the air from Blake's shoulder and started flitting through the air around us. I couldn't see exactly what he was doing, but whatever it was, it was working. Blake started going even faster, to the point where I was having a hard time placing my legs fast enough to keep up.

"Blake, that's as fast as I can go, I can't place my feet any faster." _His reaction speed and endurance are absurd. Add that hideous blade of his to the equation, and I'm no longer surprised that he's willing to fight the wendigo again, despite what it did to him last time._

Blake said nothing, apparently concentrating heavily on his running, but he briefly held his right arm out, and gave me a thumbs-up.

"Bob, how long till we catch up now?"

A few seconds later, Bob replied. "About two minutes."

"What? Explain. Has it slowed or stopped? There's no way we'll cross four or five more miles in two minutes. I know we're not moving that fast."

"It's stopped, more or less. We're about two miles from it now. It's moving laterally now, not in a straight line."

"Circling its next target, maybe." Blake commented.

As we flew through the forest at absurd speeds, I felt the lozenges in my mouth with my tongue. They were still fairly large. Quite a few minutes left before they were gone, and then thirty or so seconds after that before I started to crash. "Blake, I'm good for at least five minutes after we get there, which should be long enough to be decisive. I don't think it's going to be running away. Most of the more powerful supernatural predators won't flee unless sorely overmatched, and I doubt it will think we qualify as being scary."

In a clinical voice, Blake stated. "Didn't try to run from me before when I injured it several times before it hurt me significantly, and it fought smart. It might be smart enough to run if it thinks it might lose. I'll make crippling its legs a priority." After a second he continued, with a touch of anger in his voice. "It beat me last time. Literally tore me apart. I don't think it will be scared of me this time."

_He's actually looking forward to another fight with the same wendigo that ripped him apart before._ I shivered a bit, and it wasn't because of the cold. At almost the same instant, I saw Blake's head twitch slightly, as if he were going to look at me, and decided not to.

_I bet I fed you a bit of power with brief bit of fear there. We'll probably need it. _Bob had it right. Blake reminded me a lot of Kincaid.

The silence had stretched out a bit. "That sounds reasonable. I'm an unknown though. I've never met Carl. That doesn't mean he doesn't know about me." I stopped talking and just dodged branches for a couple seconds as I thought. "Bundled up the way I am, he probably wouldn't recognize me even if he knows me. I doubt the wendigo will be able to detect the Sword like you can feel it. I've never heard anyone say they could feel the sword unless they were around me, close by, when I was actively using it."

Blake did look back at me, briefly, only turning his head far enough for me to see his right eye, which was oddly shaped. "So, the plan is for me to charge in, start the fight, distract it, and then you follow in after me, making sure there aren't any potential victims around?"

_Is this a test or something? That's stupid._ "Evan and Bob would probably work better to scout out the area and make sure there aren't others around. I'll be right behind you." Blake nodded without looking back as I continued to speak. "You going in first is a good idea. The wendigo has fought you, and has some sense of your ability to fight. If you go in first, and I follow cautiously after you, it will probably think you are the stronger opponent."

Blake said nothing for a moment. "Are you sure you're in this thing's weight class, Butters? Even with the alchemy boosting you, based on what I've seen of your ability to run through the woods, your reflexes aren't anywhere near mine. Neither are the wendigo's, but I'm pretty sure it's still faster than you. We both know it's ridiculously strong. It stopped that truck in ten feet, and you saw how badly the front of that truck was damaged. It ripped my limbs off with casual strength."

_Thought so. He thinks I'm the weak link._ "Knights of the Sword have fought much worse than wendigo, Blake. One of us killed the dragon Siriothrax. A dragon, Blake. On this world, there are very few things that can stand up to a dragon. A wendigo is not one of them. They are immense in size and power, frighteningly intelligent, and magically powerful." I carefully controlled my voice, trying to control my irritation. "You do not understand what being a Knight of the Cross means. I am not the weak link, and before you get upset, I'm not saying you are. There is no weak link here. The only reason I am not insisting on going in first is because I'm hoping we can disable it before it realizes how dangerous I am."

After a few moments, Blake apologized. "Sorry, it's difficult to imagine an implement with the power you attribute to that sword, even though I can feel its power, even now. You're still planning on disabling it, not killing it?"

"It" and I emphasized the word, "is Carl. I'll destroy the wendigo spirit's totem if we can get it to leave Carl, but I'm not ending Carl's life. If we can get it into a circle, I can call in a lot of power to permanently get rid of something like a wendigo."

Blake started to slow down and called spoke, "Evan, scout ahead please. Don't let the wendigo see you. See what it's doing. Scouting only. If you find people nearby, try to get them away. If you need help, come back. I'll need you back soon though, for the fight."

Evan flitted off rapidly, saying nothing.

Blake slowed to a stop and loosened the rope around his waist, letting it fall around his feet as he stepped away from it. "We're within half a mile or so, right Bob?"

"Yes. It hasn't moved in about thirty seconds, Blake."

_I hope it hasn't made a kill, but if it has, it will be busy eating for a while. I need to get a promise out of Blake, if I can. _"Blake, promise me you will do your best to disable and not kill the wendigo. We'll see the wendigo ended, but I want Carl to survive."

Blake stared at me, and it was a hard stare, but I didn't see anger in it. "I do not like it, but this is your world. However, if you are knocked unconscious or dead, I will kill it if I can. Otherwise I agree to try to disable it." He paused a moment. "During the fight, I will not intentionally, through action or inaction, create a scenario where you will become unconscious or dead, unless provoked by a direct attack on me, by you."

_During the fight. Carefully worded._

"Blake, I hear what you say, and how carefully you said it." I met his eyes with my own, despite the strangeness of that right eye of his, with three pupils? "If you abide by what you just said, I will not attack you unless you give me reason to. Furthermore, after Carl and the wendigo are dealt with, I promise to ask for assistance to get you home. I do not think you would survive long in this world, and I'd prefer to not have any responsibility for what you might do here."

Blake started walking along the wendigo's trail in the snow, and I moved parallel to him, coiling rope over my shoulder across my chest like a bandolier so it would be available if needed, but out of the way.

After a second, Blake looked towards me again, seeming a little more relaxed. "I think 'unless I give you reason to' is a bit weak, but you seem to be enough of a goody-two-shoes type that I can trust you won't stab me in the back without genuinely thinking I'm an active threat. You're probably right that I wouldn't survive long in this world." He gave me a lopsided grin. "I probably won't survive long in my world either, but I have things to do there. I will abide by your request, with the restrictions that I mentioned, and I will hold you to your promise to try to find me a way home."

_I'd rather not let him kill Carl if I'm dead or unconscious, but I don't think I'm getting that agreement out of him. I'll just have to stay awake and alive._ "I agree then. When Evan gets back, we'll attack. Bob, it's still stationary?"

"It is, Boss. I suspect the wendigo has made a kill."

Blake looked at me. "If the wendigo goes after the strongest social connections, and he made a kill, Carl is probably eating a parent, sibling, wife or child right now. You want him to live with that memory?"

I shuddered at the thought as we jogged through the forest, through extremely heavy snowfall and whipping winds. "Blake, yes, I want him to at least have the option. There are ways to help people with severe mental trauma. I suspect Molly could help make sure he realizes it wasn't him doing it, and make the memories less vivid. She probably wouldn't agree to completely remove the memories though."

Blake continued staring at me. "I don't think you necessarily doing a good thing here, but I agreed, and I won't break from the deal now." He paused for a moment. "If you should choose to ask Bob to make you unconscious, briefly, after the wendigo is disabled, I'll understand what you intend, and it will not break the agreement."

_Why can't you understand?_ "Won't happen, Blake. I'm not killing an innocent man. I'm not killing a guilty man, for that matter. It's against everything I believe in, even before I became a Knight."

Blake nodded. "Understood. I can respect someone who knows what they stand for, even if we don't quite stand in the same place."

Evan appeared suddenly, dropping onto Blake's shoulder and starting to talk rapidly. "It's wrecked a house, and its reading things."

I angled Bob's staff a little forward as we walked, so I didn't have to look over my left shoulder to look at him. "Bob, that doesn't sound like a hyper-aggressive killer. Any ideas?"

"It could be really old, Boss. Remember what it did in the van? It pulled the doors in, instead of pushing them out. Then it let a truck hit it. Wendigo are really rare to begin with, and are typically only triggered into activity when they are exposed to a human who has engaged in cannibalism. You typically find their totems hidden under soil in small caves where humans might take shelter from winter weather. Very few people find themselves starving in caves with family members these days." Bob paused to make the point, and a second later, he continued. "The white council sponsored a few hunts for inactive wendigo spirit totems after one went active in Yellowstone about fifty years ago and ate sixty people before it was put down. There were still a lot of old timers alive, even in industrialized nations, who remembered where lots of little caves were. A few Fae were bargained with to get even more help. Twenty-two wendigo were found and destroyed throughout the entire world."

Blake snorted. "Too many words. We're wasting time. You think this thing is older than most technology, but still able to read?" He started jogging alongside the tracks.

Bob was silent for a moment. "Yes. Wendigo get knowledge about social connections and the language of their host, but they don't integrate all the host's knowledge. They can unerringly go directly to any place where the host has spent a lot of time. They are supernaturally good trackers, able to track by spiritual spoor, not just physical spoor. They can speak, but rarely do. They can read and write if the host could. They learn rapidly." Bob sounded a little offended, but continued. "It's more... words... but the one in Yellowstone spoke a couple times in range of people who captured it. The wendigo was not aware of the existence of the United States, but it had already learned how to drive and fuel a motorcycle two days after it found a host. It understood money and phones well enough to use a list of phone numbers from a consumed family member's purse at a payphone a day later to call the great nephew of the host that was in college and tried to lure them to a meeting."

_What did we humans do to deserve things like this trying to eat us?_ "OK, smart and adaptable then. We need to take it down before it finishes figuring out whatever it's trying to figure out. The more it learns, the more dangerous it will be."

"Evan, what was it reading?" Blake asked.

"It was going through a big stack of blue books with letters on the side, turning pages really fast. My parents had some books like it that were all dusty on the top shelf in the garage, but I never saw what was in them."

Blake started running, saying, "Encyclopedia. He'll learn about computers."

I stared, stunned, at the rooster tail of snow thrown up behind Blake as he accelerated. _Holy._ I ran as fast as I could behind him, pulling out the Sword of Faith, but not activating it's blade. "Bob please put a veil on me that will make me appear to be a couple feet from where I actually am. Try to interfere directly with the senses of the wendigo as well if you can, without hitting Blake, Evan, or me with the effects."

"Done, and will do, Boss. Don't count on the veil or sensory manipulation working very well. Remember, it is smart, _and _supernatural. Andi can spar with you successfully even when you're veiled, and I doubt her senses are as good as a wendigo's." Bob warned me in a cautioning tone.

I was up to a sprint now, and heard a loud crash of glass. "Understood. We have had this conversation before, Bob, remember?"

"Of course." He sounded a bit irritated that I accused him of being forgetful. "I'd hate to have to break in a new owner though. I don't think Andi would want me because I'd remind her of you. Murphy and I probably wouldn't get along. I might get another wizard, and that would mean no more internet or e-books."

I smiled. He might not be human, but I could still hear it in Bob's voice that I was more than just a source of internet and e-books. I wouldn't be foolish enough to consider him to be human, but there was something like friendship in there. "I understand, Bob, watch my back as well as you can, OK?"

Bob sighed. "Maybe my next owner will be a librarian or something. You and Harry both, always running off to go try and get yourselves killed. I'll be watching, Boss."

I flipped the handle of the Sword in the air for emphasis. "Part of the job, Bob. Part of the job."

I took my attention off Bob and put it entirely on the scene in front of us. There was a very large window, broken, in the middle of the house, next to a bookcase. _Not much glass outside, pieces of windows angled into the house, Blake jumped in the window. _ I could see a hole in the wall of the house where the wendigo had pushed through the door.

As I watched, the wendigo backed out of the house, already bleeding from several places, but nothing that looked serious. It was fighting defensively, taking wounds, but protecting its joints as it... retreated?

Blake was like a piranha. I had practiced fencing with some of the best swordsmen in the world, and generally gotten my butt kicked by most of them. None of them came close to his speed. Not even the Fae warriors. I could barely even see his arms moving, and he was evading every attack aimed at him with ease.

_I see why he was so confident. He's right. The wendigo is nowhere near him in speed and accuracy. _It was like watching a mantis shrimp attacking a crab. I'd been fascinated by mantis shrimp back in school when I'd first been introduced to them, and watched all the video I could find on them. I almost bought one, but decided against it when I found out they could actually break their tanks by punching them. Blake's strikes were almost too fast to be seen, and I was pretty sure it wasn't the hallucinations playing tricks on me. I rubbed my eyes and squinted, and nothing changed.

The wendigo was rapidly retreating backwards, taking two rapid steps back every time it made a wide swipe that Blake would simply leap away from. I started moving closer, staying behind or to the side of the wendigo as well as I could. It clearly knew I was there. It looked straight at me, several times, but always kept at least one eye on Blake. I had not yet lit the Sword, and since I had a staff with a skull on it, the wendigo probably thought I was a wizard. It would not be afraid of attack magic, not with its ability to regenerate, but it would probably charge me soon, as I got closer, to try to take out the lesser threat.

Neither Blake nor the wendigo said a word. I saw Evan zipping back and forth around the two of them, and he also said nothing. I also said nothing. Just watching as I got closer, trying to pretend that I wasn't dangerous. Bob's staff in my left hand, Sword hilt in my right._ It should turn on me any second now._

The wendigo backed up again, within a few feet of the full-height chain link fence around the back yard. It reached out its left arm, gripped one of the steel fence posts, and pulled it out of the ground. The sound of the fence jangling made it impossible to hear the sound of the large plug of concrete being pulled out of the ground. Despite the jangling, I did hear several loud pinging noises as the metal clips that once held the fence post to the now twisted and deformed fence sprung loose.

The wendigo leapt in my direction with a snarl, but I could tell that it had been fooled by the illusion. It was a little off center in its leap at me. At the same time, it was swinging an eight foot long, two inch diameter steel pipe at me. The head of the club was a chunk of concrete about as big as my chest. It was swinging the weapon with both hands, so rapidly that the chunk of concrete flew off and shot into the woods. The wendigo was put off balance by the sudden disappearance of the chunk of concrete that had weighted the end of its club, and hit the ground next to me with a bit of a wobble in its mighty swing. I used the strength granted to me by alchemy to jump over the blow, and while doing so, I activated the sword and cut the pipe off a few inches from its hands.

It didn't even hesitate, leaping back _away_ from me with huge force. Its incredible exertion dug a substantial hole in the frozen ground, through the snow. I could hear the power of the wendigo's impact as a loud thump of the ground absorbing the energy of the leap at me before rebounding back the way it came, turning its body around in the air one hundred eighty degrees almost like an Olympic relay swimmer finishing a turnover at the end of a lap. As it leapt away from me, over its shoulder, I could see it was leaping straight at Blake who was charging at it from behind. Blake was fast but he wasn't fast enough to dodge the wendigo completely.

_It suckered Blake. _I watched, unable to do anything useful, as the Wendigo's right arm swiped at Blake's wildly gyrating shape as my ally leapt to avoid the incoming attack. Evan was apparently helping, because Blake was rapidly curving in the air. He almost managed to avoid the blow, but I could hear the crackle of splintering wood as the claws of the wendigo struck him in the belly, disemboweling Blake with a shower of splinters as I charged the Wendigo from behind.

As Blake flew off into the woods, training a string of splinters behind him, I heard Evan scream "Blake!" and watched as the sparrow's small form followed the flying body into the woods.

The wendigo turned to face me; its right arm was bleeding profusely from a deep slash across its wrist. As it watched me charge the last few feet towards him, the wendigo quickly pulled its right arm in front of its face and bit down savagely on its own wrist. Immediately after that, the arm was ripped away as the head shook violently, tearing away a large chunk of flesh. As I struck towards its left hand with the sword, I watched as the white furred chunk of flesh fell out of its mouth.

It swatted at me with its left hand as I got close, but missed, clearly aiming a little too far to my left. I had a very hard time believing Blake's foul, broken sword could harm this creature worse that the Sword of Faith could. _The thing possessing Carl forces the host to eat its own family and friends. It's about as far from faith as it's possible to get._ From what Bob had said during our conversation before, I was pretty sure that the wendigo couldn't bleed to death. I didn't miss, striking at the left elbow, and I successfully carved a notch in it that didn't immediately heal.

As the Sword struck the wendigo's elbow, it shrieked, a deafening sound and there were definitely two voices. Unlike Black Court vampires, there was resistance to the blade. Unlike renfields, the blade did do some physical harm. Dark smoke billowed from the hole gouged into the flesh at the wendigo's left elbow. It was clearly healing, but healing much more slowly than the wendigo's self-inflicted wound had. I went in again, striking at the left knee, trying to cripple the wendigo, at least long enough to get it into a circle. The wendigo blocked me with a bleeding forearm and screamed that terrible two-voiced scream again before tearing its forearm away from the Sword.

I followed, continuing to strike rapidly. I had no choice but to attack, because the wendigo certainly wasn't backing down. It was clearly angry, but not concerned. I was running into the same problem Blake had been. The wendigo, after the first time I hit it, was not allowing me to strike vulnerable joints, blocking my blows with its forearms. It wasn't entirely on the defensive either, striking at me viciously as it backed towards the driveway. There was an old truck there, and the wendigo was probably strong enough to use it as an area effect weapon to crush me even if it couldn't tell where I was, exactly. Andi had used a similar tactic on once when we were sparring, using a big folding exercise mat. I hadn't had a clue what the heck she was doing before she swung the mat, allowing it to unfold as she swung it. It was a crude weapon, and didn't hurt me, but it had slapped me hard enough to put me off balance, and Andi had seen where I was because of how the mat bent in the air. I lost that match about two seconds later as she grappled me.

_That truck will crush me like a bug, Sword or no Sword._

The wendigo looked glanced behind itself at the truck, and then looked a little to my right, and for the first time that I had seen, it smiled. A nasty smile.

_It knows I know it's going after the truck._

I might not be as fast as Blake, but the Sword was literally a sword of light now. The blade had no mass at all. With the strength of the alchemical lozenges in my veins, the weight of the Sword's hilt was almost literally nothing to me. When I touched the Wendigo with it, I created a trench in the flesh, and whatever I touched froze in place as the wendigo shrieked. It could not overpower me by simply running me over because I paralyzed it, briefly, with every touch, stopping the limb striking at me like it hit a wall. At the same time, I couldn't control the wendigo's movement either, not fully. It was carefully protecting its legs. I couldn't push in too fast to try and strike the legs, or I'd expose myself to a strike. Even though the wendigo could not see exactly where I was, it still nearly hit me several times, and any of those hits would have maimed me.

Even when both of its arms were paralyzed, it still was able to block me using its upper arms and shoulders to put already-paralyzed forearms where they needed to be to stop the Sword.

_I can't let it get to the truck._

I didn't like talking when I was concentrating so hard on staying alive, but I needed to. "Bob, can you bind its legs, or somehow keep it away from the truck?"

Bob did not sound happy with me. "Onay ayway on the eglay angletay, Boss."

It took me a second to decipher when Bob had said, and then I realized I had just exposed a possible advantage of mine without gaining anything for it.

The wendigo swayed its head back and forth between the image of me and Bob on his staff that it could see, and growled. On its next step backward, the wendigo's foot stepped back onto the driveway, and I heard the sound of gravel shifting under the snow.

Suddenly there was a wild, angry child's voice screaming. "Sparrow of Fire!" A powerful gust of wind carrying branches, pine cones, and some gravel hit the wendigo, staggering it, driving it to my right, away from the house, away from the truck. I remained untouched. Evan, looking very much like a small phoenix, with flame wings and a long flaming tail flew straight at the wendigo's face. The wendigo grabbed at him and Evan turned aside at the last instant, dodging with incredible grace as both of the wendigo's hands failed to grasp him. "Too slow!"

Using Evan's distraction, I struck at the wendigo's left knee, putting a trench into the side of that knee and dragging the Sword across the front of both kneecaps. The with both legs paralyzed, the wendigo fell, collapsing onto its back, screaming that unearthly double-scream.

Blake stepped around from behind the truck. "Good job, Evan." He looked toward the wendigo laying on the ground. "Time to finish this."

The only warning I got was the sound of gravel grinding together, and then the wendigo dragged its hand through the gravel driveway, creating a large trench and throwing the whole mass of gravel at Blake a single motion, creating a spray of gravel that Blake simply couldn't avoid. Blake was blown off his feet, looking almost like an A-Team explosion victim. Evan's voice screamed out again. "I've got you Blake!"

The wendigo's attention snapped to me and I saw the wendigo's other hand start to move. _God protect me._ I prayed as I turned my body so my right side was facing the wendigo. I held Bob behind me, to the left of my torso and held the sword upright between my right side and the scoop of gravel that should have already hit me.

The wendigo slowly stood, keeping its right hand buried in the gravel of the driveway. "Time to see where you aren't."

A moment later the world went crazy. The Sword flared incredibly brightly, apparently protecting me somehow, in a way I hadn't seen before. My arms absorbed a huge amount of force exerted against the sword, and I flew through the air. I lost control of Bob's staff and saw it pinwheeling away in slow motion as I, myself, also spun through the air.

Moments later, I plowed through a bunch of bushes and rolled several times before I came to a stop, feeling like I'd been run over by a truck. Shaking my head, I saw a double image of the sword laying on the ground three inches in front of my eyes. I grabbed both swords with both right hands as I heard a loud, continuous thunder coming closer - wendigo footsteps. When I saw the black paws and faces surrounded by thick white fur over the top of the bushes I had been thrown through, I struck out, pointing both swords at both charging wendigo, and hoped the real sword would hit the real wendigo.

Both wendigo got a very shocked look as the sword's blade activated and drove into its gut a little to the right of center mass, two or so inches below where I guessed its lower floating rib was. A huge weight fell on me, and I tried to push it off, but couldn't. I was hurting too bad.

_I've got to get it into a circle before it recovers._

A familiar voice asked. "You awake under there, Butters?"

I managed to croak out a response despite the weight on me. "Yes, Blake. I'm awake."

Blake sounded a little disappointed. "Ah well. I'll pull it off you then. I'm guessing we want to leave your sword in there to keep it paralyzed?"

_The sword is out of my hands and still active?_

"Umm, yes, for now." I started to feel ill.

_Crap, lozenges gone._

Blake carefully pulled the wendigo off me, ensuring that the Sword remained embedded in its gut. The wendigo looked like it was being continuously shocked, vibrating slightly, occasionally twitching.

As the wendigo rolled off me, I noticed that Blake looked pretty bad again. I could see gravel embedded in various body parts, several broken bones, and a lot of broken wood. He was making some strained noises as he finished, moving stiffly and slowly.

As I stood up, I realized Blake was still moving a whole lot faster than I could. Every part of me was in pain. My head exploded into a massive headache as I stood. I was nauseous and every part of my body that had anything to say was complaining. I tried to make my hands work to get the package of mint strips out of my pocket and open it, finally managing to get a strip into my mouth, and then adding a second strip for good measure.

_Concussion is certain, not just nausea. I'm going to have to be ready to deal with that in a few hours._

Bob hovered over, slowly, dragging the staff on the ground. "Figured you might need the staff, Boss. You took a pretty heavy hit there. I've never seen the sword do that before, that was a pretty impressive shield, probably better than anything Harry ever got out of the bracelets we made."

"Considering the provenance of the swords, that doesn't surprise me, Bob. No offense." I commented as the headache began to fade, and the intermittent double vision went away.

"I am going to be in bad shape in a few hours, Bob, please begin trying to think of ways to reduce my pain without doing permanent harm to me."

"I'll summon some aspirin, Boss. When you're ready."

I wasn't sure if he was serious, and looked at him. He said nothing. I smiled and shook my head.

Blake had been busy either before he pulled the wendigo off me, or after, while I was waiting for the mint strips to deal with the concussion and nausea. Every one of the wendigo's leg and arm tendons seemed to be cut, and bleeding.

"Where do you want to set up the circle, Butters?" Blake asked as he walked over into the bushes that I had been thrown through.

I watched the bushes shift and grow into him as he stood in the middle of them. Broken sticks and branches fell out as new ones grew in. I was locked into watching the regeneration. It was absolutely fascinating. I knew I was staring, and apologized. "Sorry, Blake, watching you heal is amazing."

Blake shrugged. "No offense taken. I have to admit the first few times I watched myself heal, it was pretty captivating to me too."

Evan landed on his shoulder and Blake reached over and scratched his head. "You were an awesome fire sparrow there, Evan."

"I know. I was great!" He was clearly extremely happy with himself and Blake grinned.

I smiled. _Evan's quite the scrapper for an eight-year-old. _"Let's see if there's a concrete patio slab. If that doesn't work, we can probably use the floor in the garage."

Blake nodded as Evan fluttered up on top of Blake's head and looked towards the house. "Who are they? Did you already call for help, Butters? Wow they don't have many connections."

I looked over in the direction Evan was looking, did a double-take, and was already leaping towards the Sword when I heard Bob screaming "Outsiders Boss!"


	8. Chapter 8

1st Draft 01/14 1030

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><p>End Game<p>

The Outsiders arrive to salvage their plan, and things look grim

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><p>Whoever the newcomers were, they were definitely enemies of Bob and Butters. I didn't know if that necessarily meant that they would be enemies of mine, so I hesitated while reaching into my torso for the Hyena.<p>

Evan, startled by Bob's warning cry, didn't hesitate. He hopped off my head, diving into my torso through broken branches.

In my moment of hesitation, the two figures proved that they were indeed enemies. Both beings were shrouded in something resembling dense smoke, like some sort of video game demon. Limbs straightened towards us abruptly. Black ropes of smoke shot out. The rapidity of their arm motions made it clear that they were attacking. I was able to try to jump into cover, but before my leap brought me into the bushes I was aiming for, blackness wrapped my limbs and torso, binding me so that I could not separate my legs or lift my arms.

My trajectory was not changed by the bindings, and I landing in the bushes I had been aiming for. One of the two shadowed beings stared at me for a moment, and made a quick motion of its hands. More black ropes of smoke bound me to the ground where I lay. I was in contact with several bushes though, and I could feel them reaching into me, replacing broken branches. I was healing even though I was bound.

Butters was in a similar predicament, I could see. He had been leaping towards his sword which was still lit, and buried in the gut of the wendigo, apparently incapacitating it somehow. His leap had clearly not brought him close enough to lay a hand on his sword. He was wrapped as securely as I was, but suspended in the air, short of the wendigo's body.

The two beings looked at one another, and then at the wendigo. They both turned to me. Even though the smoke surrounding them made it difficult to see their features, I could tell they were communicating, but I could hear nothing. Butters started to say something and a black band appeared around his lower face, blocking his mouth. One of the two made a gesture and Butters flew through the air towards me, away from the wendigo, landing with a heavy thump. I could see the tension in body as he attempted to resist his bonds.

I felt Evan moving around in my torso. He said nothing. I said nothing. No need to draw more attention to myself. Not as long as they were still allowing my body to heal.

After a couple moments, one of the two Outsiders moved towards the wendigo while the other continued looking at where Butters and I lay. It spoke with a voice that was simultaneously very precise and proper, but my mind reacted with a shiver like someone was scratching their fingers down a chalkboard. "Your neck and throat appear uninjured. Can you speak, wendigo?"

The wendigo's head turned towards the Outsider that was walking towards it, shaking like he was suffering from some sort of muscular degenerative disease. The sword's effects apparently were preventing it from any sort of coordinated action. "I... can." The two words were forced, one at a time, through jaws barely under control.

"Good. We will bargain then." The Outsider paused. "Clearly, we have the advantage here, and you would be making agreements under duress. However, we were the ones that arranged for your current host, and have no wish to interfere with you in any way. Our only demand is that you kill these two in exchange for us cutting away the parts of you that will not heal, so you can heal.

The wendigo lifted its head to stare at the Outsider, muscles standing out on its neck before it started to speak, its voice quavering only slightly. "They are bound. Why not kill them yourselves?" Its head collapsed back against the ground with a thump and it breathed deeply with effort.

There was a long moment of silence before the Outsider spoke again. "That would leave evidence of our involvement. It is far easier to hide evidence of magical entrapment than it is to hide evidence of magical killing. Especially when higher powers become involved. Higher powers will become involved with that sword involved. Do you recognize what we are? Do you recognize what the sword is?"

The wendigo did not try to lift its head, speaking haltingly, with a quaver in its voice as it tried to control the involuntary muscle spasms wracking it. "I know what you are, Outsider. I do not know what the sword is, but I can feel its power, and that power does not originate with the one that wielded it." He paused. "You must have freed me from the collapsed cave that Askuwheteau used his life essence to trap us in when I last inhabited the body of a colonist. I do not wish to be indebted to your kind. I will kill them if you assist me to heal. I will then hunt, which is presumably what you freed me to do. I will then be free of any obligation to you."

"That would be a poor bargain on our part, if it were not exactly what we wanted. We have no need to have you obligated to us. We agree to your terms, with the single addition that you will not attack us while you are in your current host, Etchemin."

The wendigo said nothing for several seconds. "You know my name, and you choose not compel me?"

"There is no need to do so. All we need you to do is what you must do by your nature. Compelling you would be a waste of our resources, and a binding on you would be yet another magical fingerprint that we wish to avoid leaving." The Outsider paused. "There is also the not so subtle encouragement for you that these two and their companions now know your name."

I could feel Evan working his way down my torso towards my left side hip. With the little bit of free space I had in my bonds, I curled the fingers of my left hand into my torso and scratched him when I felt him get close to my hand. Evan was getting ready, and the wooden parts of my body were nearly healed. In another few seconds I would try to break my bonds.

Butters was looking at Bob's skull, still connected to the staff, laying several feet from him, and was clearly upset. I didn't dare bring attention to myself by asking him anything.

The wendigo was clearly unhappy by his tone. "I agree to your terms, Outsider."

"Very well." I saw the Outsider draw a dagger-like blade from somewhere in the shadows surrounding it. "I must do this with a physical device, again, to leave no magical evidence."

The wendigo's voice was flat, and annoyed. "So you expect me to fail, and be captured or die."

The Outsider kneeled by the wendigo's side and began cutting, presumably around the wounds I had created. "It is a possibility we cannot ignore."

The wendigo paused a moment. "A wizard named Dresden. That seems to be the only connection this host has with any sort of obvious power. You are afraid that I cannot defeat a young human wizard?"

There was a pause before the Outsider responded. "Who entrapped you before?"

The wendigo did not reply.

The Outsider kneeling by the wendigo was cutting rapidly, moving from one part of the prostrate body to another.

My wooden parts were healed, and I thought to myself. _I doubt there will be a better time._

I strained against my bonds, and felt them flex. I could feel Evan dancing around inside me, fluttering his wings. He made no noise, but I could feel the power coming off him, helping me push against my bonds.

The Outsider that had been watching Butters and me, saying nothing, was clearly irritated. "Stop trying to escape. You are overmatched here. Die with dignity."

I ignored him and continued to strain, trying to break free.

From inside my body, I heard Evan shriek "Libertas!" and an orange glow flashed out of my torso, illuminating the surrounding night and heavily falling snow like the flash from a camera. My bonds disappeared. For the briefest instant after the orange light went off inside me, I couldn't help but think, _please let me not be on fire_.

I leapt towards the Outsider that had been watching us, drawing the Hyena out of my torso with a single smooth motion.

The outsider cocked its head at me as I leapt, apparently unconcerned. When I was almost within arm's length, it made another arm motion, and I was slammed to the ground once again, bound in blackness. This time I couldn't move my arms at all.

I could feel Evan moving inside me, before he spoke very quietly. "I can't do that again, Blake, I'm sorry. I can't leave your torso either."

The outsider knelt next to me. "You are fascinating, and your companion spirit as well. It is unfortunate that we cannot devote time to studying you. You are certainly not of this shard of reality, or anything directly bordering it. Who brought you here, and how?"

I looked over to where the other Outsider was kneeling by the wendigo, cutting out the gouges I had made in its joints with Hyena. I stared at where my captor's face should be inside the shadows. "I will do my best to make sure you die not knowing those answers." I wasn't getting anywhere trying brute force, so I changed tactics. I was hoping to get an emotional reaction out of this enemy before the second one finished helping the wendigo recover. Bound, the wendigo would kill Butters in an instant, and I probably wouldn't last much longer.

I didn't know for sure how much pulverizing my body could take before I eventually ceased to function. I was pretty sure that the Outsiders wouldn't be fooled into thinking I was dead if I played dead like I had before. For that matter, the Wendigo would certainly not be fooled a second time either. I was very confident that I would die if the wendigo broke me into pieces like before, and set me on fire.

My attempt to get some sort of emotional response failed completely. The Outsider answered me in a calm voice. "I can see enough of your nature to know that you are clearly not persuadable through application of pain, so I'll simply collect samples when the wendigo is done. Perhaps we can divine where you came from with that." I could _feel_ the malevolence and eagerness in its chalkboard-scratching voice. "You are clearly unaware of what we are. Showing others of my race a path to a shard that doesn't know that we even exist will certainly allow me to advance my rank, perhaps multiple ranks if your shard is easy to exploit and rich in resources."

The Hyena twitched in my hand, and the Outsider's upper body moved slightly, angling towards the Hyena slightly. "That is an intriguing enchantment binding a deceased magical being into that weapon. I will take it with me as well. It may also assist in helping us find where you came from. Just think, you might be responsible for exposing your shard of reality to my kind."

_Green Eyes!_

I strained and struggled against my bonds with every bit of strength I could. I felt the dark straps surrounding me flex slightly, but my wood and bones started to break. I could feel Evan fluttering around inside me again, feel his influence on my efforts to escape, a little extra strength, a little better feel for the weak points in my bonds. I kept straining, and there was a great deal more cracking of wood and bone. After a few seconds, however, my body was too broken to exert enough force to even make the bonds flex. I probably wouldn't even be able to stand. Helpless against the strength of my bonds, I collapsed against the snow.

The Outsider had been watching me, clearly amused by my efforts to escape. It stood up and backed away from me, stating "You aren't the only being here capable of attempting to get an emotional reaction out of an enemy." As it backed away from me, it turned towards Butters, and gestured. A second later, a bound butters was slammed to the ground next to me, and I was pretty sure I heard bones break that weren't mine. The Outsider gestured again, and several still-wrapped lozenges zipped through the air towards it. Through the shadow surrounding it, an arm raised and intercepted the lozenges, carrying them towards its upper body. I stared at the arm as it moved. It was too flexible, more like a tentacle than an arm.

"We could really use one of those strange events of yours right now, Butters." I muttered.

Butters said nothing, only turning his head a little with a wince, staring at me for a second. The gag on his mouth did not stop his eyes from expressing to me that I had said something very obvious.

The outsider spoke to Butters. "Crude, but still moderately elegant alchemy. I am impressed. It even allows either salivary or blood activation. You managed to slam your head into the ground hard enough to give yourself a nosebleed, presumably to try to allow direct blood activation of one of these, if you could get the wrapper off?" It's a good thing that we're killing you now. A knight with a spirit of intellect to assist in alchemy and magical tools would be quite formidable. If they had their sword."

"Will you just shut up?" I shouted.

The Outsider took a step back, clearly surprised.

Butters gave me another "Are you stupid?" look.

I ignored the look and thought to myself. _Maybe I'm supposed to let the evil villain have his little soliloquy so the good guys have time to arrive. I have a feeling that if any miracles are coming, letting the Outsider speak his mind won't improve its effectiveness._ The wendigo was standing shakily. We'd be dead in no more than another thirty seconds.

As the Wendigo stood, it was still shaking, seeming palsied. It concentrated, slowly putting both hands on Butters' sword, trying to pull it out. The sword would not move. I could see him try to twist the sword, so it would cut its way out, with no luck. The sword was not moving at all. The wendigo looked at the Outsider next to him, and tapped the sword.

The Outsider replied a second later "I dare not touch the sword, and cannot affect it directly. After the Knight is dead, the sword may deactivate."

The Outsider then raised the blade it had used to cut out the wendigo's Hyena wounds to its upper body, hiding it in shadow briefly before lowering the blade to near its hip with a movement that looked like sheathing. _It just licked the blade to clean it._ "Due to your condition, we will keep the four enemies bound until you kill the Knight and dismember the wooden man, who will need to be burned. We will force the spirit of intellect into its skull, and you can crush that. We have trapped the bird spirit companion inside the torso of the wooden man. Your fingers are long enough that you should be able to reach into the torso and crush it without allowing it to escape."

The wendigo had been staring at the Outsider standing next to it from the time it cleaned the blade until the Outsider stopped speaking. "If you want me to be able to kill the wizard, I will need help removing this sword if killing the knight doesn't make it drop away. It is almost impossible to control myself. Even if he can't kill me, I'm too slow, and would be easily avoided. I can't create a wound large enough, fast enough to cut this much of my torso away before it heals."

"We will help you remove the sword. I'm certain we can devise some sort of physical method of creating a wound large enough to free the blade and its surrounding flesh from your body."

The Wendigo nodded, took its hands off the hilt of Butters' sword, and walked haltingly towards the two of us. Butters closed his eyes for a couple seconds, before opening them and stared at the Wendigo. The blood vessels stood out on his forehead.

Watching the wendigo walking with a couple inches of lightsaber sticking out of its gut before the hilt, and about two feet extended through it's back was almost enough to make me laugh. The bright silver-white light made stark shadows, and the shaking walking motion of the wendigo made the shadows move erratically.

_I'm going to die after being plucked apart like a frog in biology class._ That made me laugh. It was a better fate than what Ur had almost given me.

Butters looked at me again, clearly furious.

"Sorry Butters. I was just thinking that there are worse ways to die. I fought a demon once that nearly killed me. If it had managed to kill me, it would have erased all memories of my existence from the minds of everyone in my world." I looked at the Outsider who had been speaking to me earlier. "That was a moderately powerful demon. This Outsider fancies itself as powerful. It would squeal like a frightened child and piss itself if it met Ur."

Butters' eyes went from me to the two Outsiders and the wendigo, and then his eyes closed again for a second and re-opened. His face went calm.

The wendigo was approaching me first, probably because I was talking, but maybe because I had fought it twice. It said nothing as it fell heavily to its knees next to me, still shaking, and started looking at my chest, turning its head a little back and forth as it started sticking its fingers into my torso.

_Damn, it's going after Evan first._

I could feel Evan fluttering around madly inside my chest, and started to speak. "You..."

The wendigo reached over with one hand. With the forefinger and index finger of that hand, it roughly cupped my jaw, snapping my head back, and squeezed, shattering the wood and bone of my jaw. "Be silent."

"uk oo" I managed to say, despite the shattered jaw.

After staring me in the eyes for a second, the wendigo arranged itself with both hands on my chest. It was apparently too shaky and slow to catch Even, even in the enclosed space, with just one hand. It needed to try to catch and kill Evan without breaking open my chest and allowing him an opportunity to escape from the confinement the Outsiders were using to hold him in my chest cavity.

When the Wendigo was situated, it lowered its head closer to my chest to look for where Evan was hiding. I saw a streak of silver and a flash of orange as Evan screamed "Lacio!"

Something struck the wendigo in the left eye and it fell back, screaming "Jenny!" several times at an absurdly huge volume while rolling back and forth. As it rolled, clutching its eye, the wendigo created huge rents in the ground with the end of Butters' sword that still pierced it, extended from its back. A few seconds after the screaming began, the wendigo collapsed on the ground on its side, shuddering. Crying, rocking back and forth, it kept muttering again and again "Jenny, I'm sorry Jenny. So sorry."

One of the Outsiders took a step towards the wendigo, and with a spray of dirt, the wendigo snapped from a fetal position to a position on hands and knees, facing the Outsiders. He no longer seemed to be shaking as he screamed, "You claimed responsibility for giving the wendigo its host. Me. You arranged for me to be possessed by this monster that made me..." he choked up for a second "eat her." The wendigo didn't seem to be at home any longer, Carl was. He still had the body of the wendigo, and as fast as he had changed positions, he had at least some of it's strength and quickness. I couldn't tell how sane he was though, or how well he would fight Outsiders in a body he knew nothing about.

Carl fingered the ground he was kneeling on, poking his fingers deep into the rents cut into the ground, and grunted, before looking back up at the Outsiders. I hoped that meant he was thinking.

The two Outsiders took a step in unison towards Carl. One drawing a dagger-like blade, the other holding no weapon. Neither Outsider said anything, though they glanced at each other. As they took that first step, Carl charged them, spraying snow, sod, and dirt onto Butters and I. A moment later there was a titanic collision, and I was shocked and dismayed to see Carl being effortlessly held suspended in the air by the long tentacles of the unarmed Outsider, while the dagger-wielder leaned in towards him with its blade extended towards Carl's head.

The outsider with the knife spoke. "We will remove the heirloom silver and allow you to have control of your host body again." It moved in, under the arch of the other Outsider's arms and started reciting incantations as it pointed it's blade at Carl's left eye.

I couldn't stand. I couldn't talk. I couldn't do much of anything, but I could be a distraction. I started rolling away from the Outsiders, twisting my shoulders and hips, which were still mostly intact despite my efforts at escape earlier. I could feel Evan helping, and I was quickly moving at a decent clip, maybe a good jogging pace, trying to get out of line of sight, and into some bushes to heal my wooden parts. I heard Butters doing the same, grunting and groaning in pain.

Evan muttered "Get out of my head. Go help Butters!" An orange light shot out of my torso towards Bob's skull. I saw the skull on its staff skitter across the ground through the snow, getting out of line of sight of the Outsiders while angling towards Butters.

_Evan allowed himself to be possessed?_

_Evan __**better**__ have allowed himself to be possessed._

The head of the Outsider holding Carl by the arms snapped from facing Carl to facing me as I rolled away, and then towards Bob's skull as it scraped across the ground into cover. I was still rolling, but happened to be facing Carl and the Outsiders when it happened.

Carl, suspended in the air, _twisted. _I heard bones shatter as the Outsider holding him off the ground automatically resisted the twisting movement, tightening his grip. Carl, however, had already put a huge amount of energy into the twist. As I watched, the brilliant blade of Butters' sword sticking out of Carl's back arced around towards the torsos of both Outsiders, literally cutting the closer one that had been holding the blade at Carl's eye in half. The one holding Carl in the air folded forward over the brilliant blade, but didn't fall, and still gripped Carl's arms. I couldn't tell if it had been cut, or if it had dodged.

As Carl's feet hit the ground, his lower body was facing almost directly away from the Outsider, and his upper body was twisted clockwise. He looked over his shoulder and took a step backwards into the still-standing Outsider and twisted his torso again. The bottom of the second outsider hit the ground before the top did, because the tentacles took a moment to release their grip on Carl's arms.

Carl collapsed forward onto his knees and then his stomach. "I got them for you Jenny. I got them."

As the black bindings around my arms and legs disappeared, Evan shot out of my chest, straight up into the air, almost like a signal rocket. He circled the house and the area we had been fighting in several times before landing on my shoulder. "Nobody else around."

I nodded and looked at him as I struggled to crawl the last few feet to another bunch of bushes. I was fortunate that whoever lived here liked landscaping their yard with bushes. "Bob asked to possess you?"

Evan looked at me, and twisted his head, one eye directly above the other, clearly confused. "No."

I could feel myself growing angry.

Evan realized what I was thinking. "Blake. I asked him to share my body with me. He mentioned that he could possess inanimate objects and share bodies with spirits when we were chatting in his skull. I asked him to join me when everything went bad, hoping that the two of us could figure out some way to make a difference. He helped me form the words and shape the energy for the spell to break your bonds and then to throw the ring when I was too weak to do it myself." He poked my hair with his beak. "You will not get angry at Bob."

_No, I guess I won't._ "I'm glad you remembered the ring, Evan."

"I know. I'm pretty awesome like that, right?"

I struggled to raise an arm to scratch Evan's head, and couldn't quite manage to raise my hand to my shoulder due to all the broken bits. Evan saw what I was doing, and moved himself onto my chest, hanging upside down so I could scratch him as I crawled slowly on my belly and elbows towards the bushes.

I chuckled, and a few loose thorns and branches fell to the ground, as well as a few bone fragments. A minute later, I reached out and pushed my arms into the bushes, and the wood of my arms was quickly reinforced. I used my somewhat-repaired arms to pull the rest of me into the bushes, and my body repaired itself as much as it could without new bones.

I heard snow crunching, and saw Butters approaching, leaning heavily on Bob's staff. As he saw me look at him, he asked "Are you OK, Blake?"

"Not really, but I'm good enough." I looked back at the Carl, the brilliant bar of light sticking out of his lower back was shaking back and forth as he cried. "What are we going to do with Carl?"

Butters took a deep breath and winced. "That smarts. At least two broken ribs." After a second he continued. "I made a phone call from the house and explained the situation. Someone should be here shortly, but we need to get Carl into a circle. I don't trust him to not run off, and her guardian promised he would kill me if they arrived and either the wendigo, or Carl, was not inside a circle. They are waiting for me to signal them."

I nodded. "I agree, but if he resists, we're not stopping him, as badly as I'm beat up now, and with him in possession of your sword."

The two of us started walking slowly towards Carl. "I could probably take my sword back, but I'm far from certain that would be a good idea. That's why I called Ivy. Do you have an Archive where you are from?"

I responded, startled a bit, and confused. "What? Of course we do. Plenty of them. Libraries, you know. We had one in Hillsglade house. Most serious practitioner families have a library. At least one."

"Ah." Butters chuckled. "Not quite the same thing. You said you weren't a practitioner long. Maybe there is one but you don't know about it. Imagine a single person with the sum total of knowledge of every shred of information ever put in writing by mankind. That's what I mean by an Archive. The Archive. Ivy is the current Archive."

"Everything ever put in writing? In the head of one person? Is this some kind of joke? That's absurd." I stared at Butters. "If she knows everything written down, why didn't you just write her a note earlier instead of using the phone?"

Butters shook his head. "Not a joke. I don't know how it came to be. I suspect that somebody with divine powers got upset at humans for burning libraries, or maybe smashing clay tablets, and set it up. Ivy's family line has carried the ability for millennia according to Harry. I didn't just write her a note because she doesn't pay attention to most of what is written down, she only records it. The actual person part of her is like a reference librarian. I'm not on her _short_ list." He chuckled. "The signal to come to us though - that will be written by me."

The body of the wendigo stopped shaking, and it looked towards us. I tensed and reached into me torso, not pulling out the Hyena, but preparing to.

The white-furred body pushed itself upright, groaning and gripping its gut. "Whoever you are, you are right to be concerned. I know I need to be in a circle. I can feel the wendigo in me, and it's furious. Weak, but furious. I can't know for sure that it won't manage to find a way to do something disruptive if I'm not contained. My mother has a permanent circle set up for medium work in the garage. If the concrete isn't cracked, it should be intact, and it's large enough to contain me, even in this body."

Carl paused, and asked, in a stressed voice. "My name is Carl. Thank you for what you have done."

"Just call me Butters, Carl." He tapped Bob's staff on the ground. "The skull on the staff is Bob. That's Fidelacchius sticking through you right now."

"My name is Blake, Carl, and this is Evan." I scratched Evan's head. "I think we need to thank you too."

In a whisper, Carl begged. "Please don't thank me for anything I've done since this monster possessed me." He went silent except for a whispered "Jenny, I'm sorry Jenny.", and turned away from us, struggling to stand as he walked towards the house.

Butters walked a little faster, closing the distance between them, leaning heavily on Bob's staff. "You are not responsible for what the wendigo did, Carl. Do you know anything about wendigo lore?"

Carl stopped and turned slightly towards Butters. "I know enough. I know I didn't make the decisions." He paused and pointed at the sword hilt at his stomach. Did you say this was Fidelacchius? You are a Knight of the Cross, the new wielder of this sword?"

Butters nodded. "Yes. I am."

Carl turned back towards the house, his voice a little louder. "I suppose that explains a lot about today. I always dreamed of being a Knight of the Cross. I think every child with magical gifts and a little magical education does. But there's never been a Knight of the Cross who was also practitioner, has there?"

After a second or two, Butters responded. "Not that I am aware of, today excepted."

With an unsteady swaying motion, Carl froze. "Stop. Don't pollute your office by including me, because I am damned well not worthy of it."

Raising his right hand, Butters extending his index finger upwards in the universal symbol for making an important point. "I didn't include you. If you know anything about Knights, you know that we are most certainly not the ones making all of the decisions. A lot of them, yes, but not all. And a lot of the bigger decisions are made for us. Especially who the swords will work for. Think about the absurdity of what happened since we started to fight. You remember it all, right?"

Carl walked into the hole in the house where the Wendigo had simply pushed through the front door. "Yes. Yes I do." He stumbled and braced himself against a wall, pushing his hand through sheetrock. He pulled his hand out of the wall, muttering "Sorry, mom."

The inside of the house was trashed, and very little of it had been me charging in to try to keep the wendigo from educating itself. Carl was scanning the house with a slow gaze as he walked through the house, carefully avoiding cutting anything with the lightsaber sticking out of his back. We gave him plenty of room.

After about twenty feet and two turns, we passed through the kitchen into the garage. Neither bay had a car in it. One of the bay doors was clearly locked, and on the concrete pad in front of that door was a massive circle, at least eight feet in diameter, inscribed into the smooth concrete floor in copper and silver.

Leaning forward carefully, Carl looked at the circle briefly, and nodded. "I need one of you to test the integrity of the circle, please. If it's intact, please activate it. I made this for Mom, when I was sixteen. It will hold anything short of Fae nobility. I'm confident it will hold the wendigo even if it regains full control."

Bob detached himself from his staff and moved slowly around the circle, clearly examining it. After doing a complete circuit, he commented. "Solid work, but then I should expect that from the two other things I've seen that you did. Very few humans can create works that I don't understand in their entirety with a brief examination. You've challenged me twice, and done the impossible once."

"What did I do that was impossible?" Carl asked, clearly confused.

Bob's skull floated down to a point on the circle that looked like a tail was sticking out, and set himself on the edge of it. "Empowering the circle now."

I felt a sharp snap of power in the air, and Carl, now seated cross-legged in the circle, reached forward and tapped the inner field of the circle. There was a deep-throated tone when he touched the inner surface.

Bob continued speaking. "The help beacon in the van was a recursive accumulator diagram."

Carl snorted. "That's impossible. Seriously impossible."

Bob said nothing for a few moments, but eventually broke the silence. "Butters, please show the diagram to Carl. I want to see if he can understand it now."

Butters pulled a diagram out of his backpack. I recognized it as the one from the van, and the cleanly cut edges of metal made it clear how it had been cut free. He also pulled his pince-nez from his front shirt pocket and put them on. Bob floated over next to Butters and the diagram was lifted into the air, and then Bob hovered back towards Carl, who scooted a little closer to the inside of the circle.

Nerdspeak ensued. Magic nerdspeak. Butters and I mostly tuned it out, though we were both watching Carl. One thing was pretty clear. Carl didn't know what he had done. He had apparently been smacked on the head pretty hard in the wreck, and suffering from hypothermia as he was trying to create the diagram. He was horrified at the fact he had used his dead girlfriend's blood as ink, but when Bob explained that the diagram had charged to an absurd degree and then ripped Evan and me out of a universe far enough removed from their home universe that we didn't even know what a 'Nevernever' was, Carl looked at me sadly.

"I'm very sorry you two. I have no idea how to get you home."

"It was clearly not intended. I'm hoping The Archive might be able to send me home." _I was hoping you might too, but I have more confidence in the holder of all human written knowledge than a one-trick-pony savant._

Butters spoke up, clearly trying to force cheer into his voice. "Speaking of which, let's get the Archive in here and see what she has to say about getting rid of the wendigo and sending Blake and Evan home." He pulled a little notebook out of one of the pockets of his backpack, and a pen out of a pocket inside his jacket and scribbled something.

I looked on the paper. It read, simply, "We're ready. Carl is contained."

We all waited for the Archive, thinking our personal thoughts. Carl had been muttering to himself for a couple minutes, before he spoke up, suddenly. "We don't need the archive for me. It's pretty clear that I invited the possession with that unrestricted diagram. I was not coerced. No amount of power is going to be able to remove or eliminate the wendigo from inside me until it's sated, or I'm dead. I have the opportunity to entrap a wendigo inside this circle so that you can see it destroyed. I've already lost one person who I loved."

I looked at Butters. I didn't know enough about magic here to evaluate.

Butters started to get upset. "You have no idea what The Archive can do! She's powerful, but not the highest power that I can appeal to. Remember that I'm a Knight of the Cross, and think about the connections I have. I cannot, and will not, promise intervention from on high, but it's very rare that a Knight cannot find a better solution than death for an innocent man. Do not let the terror of the last few hours that you were possessed break you."

I looked at Bob, but there were no clues coming from that direction

Carl looked up as us, calmly. "While I know it wasn't me that killed her, if I get loose, I will kill my family, my friends, even my acquaintances. I know what's waiting for me if the wendigo ever manages to get free of whatever bonds are placed on it. I refuse to allow any possibility of that happening. My life for the destruction of a wendigo? It's a small price." His voice dropped in tone, and he sniffled. "Besides, I never told her so, but I was willing to follow Jenny anywhere. I was afraid she wouldn't be able to deal with the cold here. I'm sure she's somewhere warmer now." His features settled into calmness. "Tell my mother I loved her, and I'll see her when it's her time."

Butters lunged towards the circle and I grabbed him. He started to yell "Don't..."

It was too late. Carl had gripped the hilt of the sword and was already speaking. "Please turn off. It's time to destroy the monster inside me."

The brilliant bar of light disappeared. Carl placed the sword hilt on the ground, and said "Thank you."

Carl jerked three times in rapid succession before he collapsed to the ground and started to burn. The left eye was first, a gout of flame, spreading rapidly from there, consuming the entire body within seconds, leaving a pile of ash. Only one thing continued to burn in the ashes, a small wooden figurine with a silver ring on its chest. As the figurine burned, there was a barely audible, high pitched scream which lasted at least two minutes. Finally, the figurine was more ashes than wood, and the ring clinked to the concrete as the chest of the figurine collapsed underneath it. The tiny clink of the ring marked the end of the scream.

A man's voice spoke from the entrance of the garage. "I agree. Carl is definitely contained."

I jumped, surprised, and Evan streaked out of my chest and orbited me once, before landing on my shoulder. We both looked at the man standing in the doorway, and the young teenager standing three paces behind him.

Shoulders slumped, Butters was staring at the ashes. "I'll never understand how people can give up like that."

I had an issue with that. "Butters, you think that was giving up? I'd say that was winning. Maybe he could have won a different way, but I'll be damned if he didn't win." I turned my head a bit. "Bob, the wendigo spirit is destroyed, right?"

Bob replied crisply. "Yes. The spirit is eradicated. I watched it unravel as the figurine burned. There was no deception."

"I think we're going to have to agree to disagree, Blake. I consider it a loss whenever people die." Butters leaned forward towards the circle, clearly intending to pick up the hilt of his sword from where it was lying inside the circle.

"Stop. Don't break that circle." The man at the door commanded.

Butters paused for a moment, clearly considering ignoring the man, but stood up straight. "Fine, Kincaid. Go ahead and check it yourselves."

Kincaid spoke again. "Please take no offense, Blake, but you need to move to the far side of the garage and stand against the wall, and not move. I've seen a whole lot of things in this world and I've never seen anything like you before. You're not getting near my charge until I have a better sense of you, and I'm not wanting to try to do that and let Ivy make sure the wendigo is eradicated at the same time."

"Fine. I understand fear of the unknown." I stepped back, as requested, and leaned against the far wall of the garage next to a chest freezer and some old fishing poles. Despite my comments, I felt no fear directed at me from either of the newcomers, which was a bit disappointing at this point. I really needed a little pick-me-up.

The girl simply stared at me for about five seconds before following Kincaid into the garage. Judging from the face and thin figure, which was all I could see reliably due to the heavy winter clothing, she might have been anywhere from twelve to sixteen. Her complete lack of an emotional reaction to my appearance probably would have given me the creeps if I could feel fear. She looked at me like I was a potted plant. However, when her eyes drifted right, I saw a little smile ghost across her face.

She stopped in front of the circle, and made a couple motions with her hands before touching the little tail of copper that Bob had used to feed power into the construct earlier. "The area contained within the circle is occupied by nothing with intelligence. Retrieve your sword, Knight."

Butters leaned over and pulled the sword from the circle. "Thank you for the second opinion, Ivy." Despite the comments to Kincaid earlier, there was no insincerity in his words that I could detect, and the girl nodded.

Despite the fact that they had come here at Butters' behest, when the sword was picked up, Kincaid moved subtly to a position where he would be better able to get between Butters and the girl.

Butters noticed it too, and turned his head slightly, narrowing his eyes at Kincaid, who just gave a little shrug without even looking directly at Butters. After a moment, Butters nodded and stepped back.

I'd never done bodyguard work before, but it was clear I was watching a professional. He seemed aware of everything around him, each movement in the room caused him to react slightly, tensing here, relaxing there, like he was adjusting himself to be ready for anything, all the time.

One of the two other matters that you mentioned is very clear, Knight." She nodded in my direction. "What of the other?"

"I was not explicit over the phone, because the connection was not secure. It's potentially something that you don't want to know."

The girl raised an eyebrow, and I nearly laughed.

Butters shook his head. "Carl Baskins created a recursive accumulator diagram. He used the power generated by that to pull two beings into this universe from so far out that one of the two Outsiders Carl dispatched didn't recognize his origin, and was actually speaking in curiosity."

After a moment the girl spoke. "I see. Mr. Baskins apparently never put this on paper?"

"So you haven't seen it?"

The girl paused for a moment. "No. Not that I recognize. That may make sense, since recursive accumulators are supposed to be impossible. I might not recognize it. You would not believe how much of what I see is complete drivel."

"Do you _want_ to see it?" Butters asked.

There was no hesitation at all. "Yes. Of course."

Butters pulled the diagram out of the pack, looking at it. "It's a little warmer in here. I'm not certain if the blood is dry or frozen. Be careful not to warm it."

Bob spoke. "It is dry. I dried it to be sure it didn't warm up and smear."

Butters and the girl both looked at Bob for a moment.

Butters said "Thank you for that, Bob."

Butters handed the diagram to the girl, who simply stared down at it for about ten seconds before saying "Remarkable. Incredibly irresponsible. Horribly dangerous. Non-coerced necromantic materials required." She made a gesture with one of her hands and the diagram disappeared off the circle of steel. "If Carl were still alive, we would be having a very long discussion right now, and he would be walking away from it missing memories. Bob, you will forget all specifics about this diagram. That's not a request. Butters, as Bob's owner, please enforce my demand."

Butters stared at her for a moment. "Bob, do as she says, after this conversation is over."

Bob sighed. "Yes, Boss."

The girl then stared at Butters for a few seconds. "You intentionally avoided learning enough to replicate it easily, but you still know it's possible, and what you know plus Bob's ability, could potentially lead you to solving it again. Will you allow me to tweak those memories, replace a few critical facts with falsehoods?"

After a brief moment of indecision, Butters answered. "Provided that it does not interfere with my understanding of general magic theory, yes. Please. I'm uncomfortable with this knowledge. The temptation to do something is not very high, considering the material components." He closed his eyes. "However, as you said, the blood need not be coerced, so it would not be hard for me to get as a person with a coroner's license. I'd rather not have the temptation."

The girl nodded, and stared at Butters for a moment, before turning to me. "And now you two. Quite an odd couple. A pair, so different, linked together." She paused. "That diagram told me nothing about your origin. I am not going to be able to help you get home. I have no knowledge about anything so far removed from our universe as you were." She paused. "Blake, Evan, can either of you replicate the diagram Butters just showed me?"

Evan, being helpful, commented. "Sure. I memorized it. Want me to scratch it out? I could probably use a feather in my beak to make it look right."

She girl sighed, and I slowly raised my hand, ready to hide Evan from the girl's view, prepared to smash my way through the garage door.

"No. I intend no harm, Blake. You need not be ready to flee." She paused. "If you, Blake, knew how to duplicate it, I might feel forced to take more direct action. Your companion though, I can see enough of his nature that I believe I can safely offer a geas to prevent him from using or distributing that knowledge."

I wasn't sure if I should be insulted at her appraisal of my character, even though I agreed with her appraisal of Evan's. Even if she was probably right. There were very few weapons I wouldn't use. Giving up Evan's knowledge was not something I would normally want to agree to, but it wasn't MY knowledge, and I didn't know what reaction we'd get if I forbid it. Evan might even disagree with me. I sighed. "Evan, it's up to you. Your mind."

Evan looked up at me, and then at the girl. He shook his feathers and wings, looking like a little puffball for a moment before his feathers fell back into place. "Your name is Ivy, right?"

Ivy grinned, looking up at Evan. "That's the name I go by with people, yes. Do you mind if I tell you that you are really cute when you're all puffed up like that?"

Evan looked back and forth from me to Ivy. "I like her, Blake. She has so many connections she looks like the sun."

From what Butters was saying, I knew she was potentially more powerful than any enemy we had ever faced other than Ur. I was in bad shape. Evan was certainly drained. She was fresh, and Kincaid was an unknown. Since he was bodyguarding this girl, as powerful as she was, it was pretty certain he'd be at least a medium-level badass in a fight. Possibly able to take me by himself.

And then there was Butters. He was watching, not as closely as Kincaid was, but he was watching, and he would almost certainly trust Ivy more than me.

In a careful, even tone I advised Evan. "You know as much as I do about how powerful Ivy is. I'm going to trust you to guide us through this. As long as all we're talking about is a few of your memories, I will let you make the decisions. Like I said, your mind. They are your memories."

Evan looked at me for a moment, clearly a bit confused. "Thank you, Blake."

Butters folded his arms and took a couple steps away from Ivy and Kincaid. Kincaid relaxed slightly.

With a flutter of wings, Evan hopped off my shoulder.

Kincaid tensed instantly and started to react. If he wasn't playing a trick, he was much slower than me, but there wasn't any need for me to react. Ivy had apparently predicted Kincaid's action and was already raising a hand in front of Kincaid, clearly indicating for him to stand down.

I hadn't even flinched. Kincaid stared at me. Still no fear of me that I could detect. I really didn't want to spend much time around him. I'd probably end up fighting him over something stupid. Fear was useful. It helped prevent unnecessary fights. With neither of us fearful of each other, there would be a fight the first time one or the other of us encroached too close on something the other cared about or felt responsible for, and I didn't want to kill the little girl's bodyguard. He seemed to be professional, even if he had me on edge.

Evan landed on Ivy's shoulder, and hopped around a bit, looking disgustingly happy as Ivy scratched him with a green-painted fingernail, letting him choose where she should scratch. They muttered to each other for a while and Evan finally stood still, cocked his head at her, and said "Yes. I agree to that. Even though you can't send us home, I understand how dangerous it is."

"Agreeing is binding, Evan. You won't be able to disagree. You won't be able to remember agreeing, so you can't even come back and argue later. That's still OK?"

"As long as it's only about the diagram, sure, I'll forget it."

Ivy smiled at him, whispered in his ear and scratched his head after Evan said "Yes."

After the head scratch, Ivy spoke again. "Done. If Butters can't find you a way home, I'll be watching for you to write me. You can write, right?"

"Of course, I'm eight!" Evan exclaimed, getting a brief sideways glance from Kincaid.

Ivy grinned. "Remember it has to be on paper, or vellum, or parchment. Not a computer."

I watched all this as Kincaid watched me. I was getting more and more irritated by his presence and his scrutiny.

Ivy went stock still for a moment, and then shook her head as she became much more serious. "Oh. Kincaid, we need to go. Something has come up. Urgent."

Kincaid nodded. "Let's go then, so you can tell me about it and we can plan."

Ivy nodded. "OK. Before we go though, Blake, if you and Evan can't make it home, Evan can write to me and ask for help. I'll introduce you two to the Summer Court and Winter Court. I suspect that you would align better with Summer than Winter, but I'm not entirely certain about that."

Evan flew back to my shoulder and watched Ivy and Kincaid leave with me. As she was leaving, I heard Ivy mutter a couple words, and then she twittered, literally twittered, a high pitch series of sounds that were being chirped so fast that I knew I was hearing almost none of it. Evan was silent for a moment, clearly stunned, and then responded in kind. For a couple seconds as Ivy walked away, she and Evan had their own little conversation at bird-speed.

When he and Ivy stopped chatting, I scratched Evan's head, a little envious of his ability to make friends so easily. Of course, he looked cute, and acted cute when there wasn't a fight going on. Cute was about as far from an adjective to describe me that I could imagine.

_Green Eyes. I hope we can find our way home._

Butters' phone rang, startling him. He picked up and answered, cautiously. "This is Waldo. You found me. How can I help?"

Evan and I looked at each other, and almost didn't laugh. Butters watched us trying not to laugh with a bit of a grin as he listened to the phone.

"Guardian Angel Towing", you say? No, I didn't call for you, but if you are already by the Roadrunner I left on the side of the road, yes, I'd appreciate it if you would load up the car and bring it here." He provided a tag number, and a VIN from a receipt in his backpack, and then fiddled around with his phone for a bit, giving an address.

"This whole cosmic concierge thing would spoil me, Butters. How do you deal with it?"

"It's not all the time. I'm surprised it's still happening now. Carl's situation is... resolved." He looked towards the circle, and his shoulders slumped a little.

I heard someone else walking through the front of the house, and tensed. Butters turned towards the door that Ivy and Kincaid had just left through. A pair of men in blue and white cold weather outfits walked in the door, smiling.

Butters was clearly irritated. "Oh, come on. This is ridiculous even for you guys. You only called me a couple minutes ago."

The one on the right, spoke first. "Well, we understand that there's a Jewish mother expecting her son to show up for a marriage of a close family member tomorrow. That sort of thing is very important, you know. You and I, Butters, we're going to take care of that. I haven't driven a real muscle car in years." He cracked his knuckles, and flexed his fingers with a grin.

Butters stared for a second. "Am I ever going to get used to this?"

The other stranger grinned. "We hope not. Takes all the fun out of it. The job's definitely worth doing even without fun, but it's always good to enjoy your work, right?"

Butters quietly face-palmed, and then looked through his fingers.

Me? I just stared at the nametags.

Gabriel and Raphael. The two laughed for a few seconds at our expressions.

Raphael stopped laughing, and pointed to Evan and me, smiling. "You two are with me. We need to do a little reality tweaking. No offense, but you've got the big guy a little anxious. You were brought here for the one job, but don't belong here. He's not telling us everything, but he _really_ wants you back where you belong."

Evan finally said something. "Gabriel and Raphael? Seriously? And you know where we're from? Why do you show up here and not on our world? There's been a couple times where we could have _really_ used your help."

Evan was a little hot under the collar, but not disrespectful. Yet. I hoped I wouldn't have to try to control him, because I was damn sure not fighting an archangel.

Raphael looked at my shoulder, where Evan was sitting. His face was serious now. "Evan, we do show up there. You, personally, just haven't seen us. Sorry. We act under a higher authority, and there are only very limited circumstances that any non-divine being will ever meet us and know it. There are people like Knights on your world too. Jeremy is one, but he works for a... different employer than Butters here."

Evan and I looked at each other. "I don't think we are going to understand it, Evan. Butters doesn't."

Evan started muttering under his breath, low enough that I couldn't hear.

"So we're in a hurry. That's why you did the two minute car-delivery?" Butters asked. "Why not poof the car here and not play games calling me on the phone?"

The two archangels just looked at each other and shrugged.

"Well, that's not all of it." Gabriel said. "I need to let you vent at me for a little while about what happened to Carl, so we can have a conversation about free will and divine intervention." He shrugged. "It's a conversation that every knight has with us, rather regularly. We are very careful to make certain it happens. It's far too easy for you to think we arrange for people to do what Carl did, when we really do allow options." The look on his face was no longer even remotely funny, but it wasn't angry. It was deadly serious.

Butters looked irritated for a moment. "Yes, I think I do need to have that talk with you, because I certainly don't understand it as well as I'd like to." He paused. "Then I need to speak to Rabi Bebi. Again."

Gabriel smiled, a little sadness in his eyes. "Please don't doubt yourself, Butters. If effort and determination would lead to understanding, I think you'd know as much as me. Some things just don't have comprehensible answers without a connection to divinity. Say your farewells, we need to go our separate ways. Fun aside, there are a great many things we have to tend to."

Butters walked over to the circle and reached into the ash. "Bob. We need to get this to the family of the woman in the van, Jenny. Make sure I do not forget. High priority."

"Done, Boss. I'll remind you after the wedding if you don't remember first." Bob replied.

Butters turned to face me, and walked to hand-shaking distance. "I won't lie and say I enjoyed your company. We clearly have a lot of major differences in opinion on things like what happened to Carl." He was silent for a moment. "Not to mention your need for fresh human remains to heal yourself. That being said, Thank you for helping. I'm not sure I could have done it without you." He thrust out his hand to me and I took it, carefully, so I didn't hurt him.

Evan and Bob were mumbling together in Bob's skull. I hadn't even noticed Evan leaving my shoulder. "I think separating these two is probably a good idea. Something about the two of them working together regularly just scares me."

Butters nodded. "I agree."

A moment later, Evan popped out of Bob's skull and fluttered over to my shoulder. "Bye, Butters! Bye Bob!"

Raphael cleared his throat. "I think you're forgetting something, Evan." He pulled a stack of post-it notes from one pocket, and a tiny inkwell from another, carefully unsealing it, and setting the two side by side on a shelf.

"Oh, thank you. I can't believe I almost forgot I could say goodbye to her." Evan hopped off my shoulder and onto the shelf next to the post-it notes and the inkwell, and then started grooming himself, muttering, "I know I felt a loose feather in here somewhere." A second later, he plucked a feather and dipped it in ink, holding it in his beak as he rapidly scrawled a note.

Not only could he write, he wrote neater than I ever had, even using a feather. I was impressed.

Ivy,

Archangel Raphael is giving us a ride home!

I'll try to write you from home.

I know you can't write back, but that's OK.

Evan


	9. That's All Folks

I had a lot of fun with this, and experimented with real planning! There was a plan for the story! A new first for me!

I'll be heading back over to Wordpress to do original fiction again.

If you search in Google for ['Farmerbob1' and ('Symbiote' or 'Reject Hero')] you will certainly find me.

My next project is called 'Set in Stone' I have been working on backstory, and am nearly ready to begin planning the first few books.

Hope you all had as much fun reading as I had writing!


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